Empirical Studies of Programmers

This volume looks at the obvious trend in the computing evolution from studies of student programmers and toward studies of real programmers performing real programming tasks. The percentage of student and professional programmers in the studies reported in papers presented at ESP 1 and ESP 5 has nearly flip-flopped. There is now an emphasis on the practical application of the research results both in industry and in academia. The papers and posters of this workshop include a range of programming language paradigms beyond the procedural paradigm: functional, logic, visual, object oriented and concurrent programming. This appears to be an indication of the maturation of the field. No longer is it a question of whether to study programmers, but more a question of which apsects of the porgramming that make it an important area of study.