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Aucbvax.6230 fa.works utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Fri Feb 19 12:51:57 1982 Perceived Complexity of computer and/or text editing systems >From JONL@MIT-MC Fri Feb 19 12:22:00 1982 Re Your quest: Date: 17 February 1982 1639-EST (Wednesday) From: Jeff.Shrager at CMU-10A To: works at MIT-MC, human-nets at MIT-MC, *tens at MIT-MC Subject: Perceived or actual complexity of systems I am seeking pointers to papers etc on the actual or perceived complexity of programming languages, systems, interfaces, or processes relating to computers (debugging, editing, etc). Are there any good dimensions along which to measure perceived complexity? Have any experiments been done to measure this? (Note that the kind of complexity that we are interested in is not directly related to complexity of algorithms whose metric is of the sort: NSquared, or NLogN. Rather, we are looking for measures in terms of learning curves, or funnction use statistics (or anything else that might indicate this sort of "human" complexity, not "mathematical" complexity)). I'd reccomend looking at a paper by Beau Sheil of XEROX Palo Alto Research Center "Coping With Complexity", CIS-15 (ssl-81-4) April 1981. Also someone else at Xerox did a recent PhD thesis about the complexity of using text editing systems (maybe Terry Roberts?); probably Beau can give you pointers. Dr. Beau Sheil XEROX Palo Alto Research Center 2400 Hanover St. Palo Alto CA Arpa-Net: SHEIL@PARC-MAXC

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