José Duarte, PhD
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

Hi Sam — Thanks for the tip! I had never heard of Budgie. Is it new? I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it. When I think of nice flavors of Ubuntu, I think of Mint, and also Elementary OS as another distro that’s focused on good UI (I don’t remember if they’re based on Debian/Ubuntu). Budgie looks pretty good, much better than the orange Ubuntu UI. Until now, Fedora was my fave, and I like Clear Linux as a server OS. I’m having a hell of time settling on my web server OS right now: Alpine, Clear Linux, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Fedora, I’ve been playing with all of them. I wish Microsoft would make Windows Server 2016 free for personal websites — it would give them much more exposure. It’s a good server, but most developers never come into contact with it.

There is one programming language designed around empirical research: Quorum: https://quorumlanguage.com/

I think the researcher, Andreas Stefik, jumped the gun though. He ran a couple of studies with small, unrepresentative samples on things like what terms and syntax beginners favored or understood more. That’s mostly what he’s basing his decisions on, and it’s not clear to me that that’s the only thing we should be optimizing for. And it’s confusing that integers are called integers but floats are called “numbers”. That’s too broad and basic a term to use for the very specific subset of numbers that floats are. If beginner’s don’t favor “floating point decimal” or whatever on a survey giving them a list of other choices, that doesn’t really matter. They’ll easily learn what a float is. There are much deeper issues of syntax and learnability that could be addressed in a PL design.

José Duarte, PhD

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Social Psychologist and advocate for scientific validity. I research the psychology of envy. I also develop new theory and tools for methodological validity.