An empirical study of novice program comprehension in the imperative and object-oriented styles
V. Ramalingam, Susan Wiedenbeck · 1997
The objective of this study was to determine whether the mental representation of object-oriented programs differs from imperative programs for novice programmers.In our study novices who had little or no previous programming experience studied and answered questions about three imperative and three object-oriented programs.The questions targeted information categories making up the program model and the domain model representations of the programs.It was found that there was a sharp contrast between the mental representations of the imperative and object-oriented programs.While the comprehension of the imperative programs was better overall than that of the object-oriented programs, the mental representations of the imperative programs focused on program-level knowledge.On the other hand, the mental representations of the objectoriented programs focused more strongly on domain-level knowledge.The results tend to support the view that language notations differ in how well they support the extraction of various kinds of information.