Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry
Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry
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了解会话式程序员：软件行业的视角
DOI：
10.1145/2858036.2858323
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Philip J. Guo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Parmit K. Chilana;Rishabh Singh;Philip J. Guo
最近的研究表明，一些学生学习编程的目标是成为对话式程序员：他们希望发展编程素养技能，而不是将来写代码，而是主要发展对话技能，更好地与开发人员沟通，并提高他们的市场竞争力。为了调查在实践中是否存在这样一群对话式程序员，我们调查了一家大型跨国技术公司的专业人员，他们不是软件开发人员。根据3151份来自从未或很少写代码的专业人士的调查回复，我们发现他们中有相当一部分人（42.6%）在工作中学习编程。虽然这些受访者中的许多人希望执行传统的最终用户编程任务（例如，数据分析），我们发现学习编程的两个主要动机是提高技术对话的效率和获得有市场价值的技能。这项工作的主要贡献是在经验上建立对话式程序员在大型软件开发环境中的存在和特点。
Recent research suggests that some students learn to program with the goal of becoming conversational programmers: they want to develop programming literacy skills not to write code in the future but mainly to develop conversational skills and communicate better with developers and to improve their marketability. To investigate the existence of such a population of conversational programmers in practice, we surveyed professionals at a large multinational technology company who were not in software development roles. Based on 3151 survey responses from professionals who never or rarely wrote code, we found that a significant number of them (42.6%) had invested in learning programming on the job. While many of these respondents wanted to perform traditional end-user programming tasks (e.g., data analysis), we discovered that two top motivations for learning programming were to improve the efficacy of technical conversations and to acquire marketable skillsets. The main contribution of this work is in empirically establishing the existence and characteristics of conversational programmers in a large software development context.