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A survey of how practicing programmers keep up-to-date first results including their implications for computer science education

Published:01 August 1978Publication History
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Abstract

As the field of data processing grows, it becomes increasingly important for the computer professional to keep abreast of new developments. Because one of the most significant of these new developments is structured programming, we decided to use knowledge of structured programming concepts as a measure of how up-to-date a programmer is. Thus, we undertook to answer the following questions:

1. How up-to-date are today's programmers, i.e. how aware are they of some of these new concepts?

2. From what sources did they learn about these concepts? How much did these sources influence their work?

3. What are some of the other factors which influence up-to-dateness?

To find the answers, we prepared a survey of sixteen questions. The first fifteen questions were designed to provide us with a background profile of our polled population. The last question dealt specifically with structured programming, presenting a list of programming concepts and potential sources for learning about these concepts. The respondent was questioned about his familiarity with a particular concept, his source of learning about the concept, and the degree to which his work was influenced by this source. The responses were input to a program written in CROSSTABS, a commercially available utility package, to produce tables of cross-tabulations and frequency percentages. We analyzed these tables and our conclusions drawn from this analysis follow.

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  1. A survey of how practicing programmers keep up-to-date first results including their implications for computer science education

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        cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
        ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 10, Issue 3
        Proceedings of the 9th SIGCSE symposium on Computer science education
        August 1978
        178 pages
        ISSN:0097-8418
        DOI:10.1145/953028
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGCSE '78: Proceedings of the ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
          August 1978
          178 pages
          ISBN:9781450374347
          DOI:10.1145/800130

        Copyright © 1978 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 August 1978

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