The only problem is, people have been doing these experiments for 30 years, and do you know what the net effect it's had on the world of programmers: none at all. Saying "no no, this time really listen to this study" seems to be having no effect.
There are a lot of causes for this, not least of all the things you mention (nobody cares about science, people like or dislike based on non-scientific evidence).
But it's also because people know that all these studies are flawed. As much as I hate to be the "nitpicker" who takes apart studies, EVERY SINGLE STUDY on programming doesn't even come close to real-life scenarios. In fact, one of the few studies that people actually believe is the "some programmers are 10x better" study, and that was actually fairly well conducted - many students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them.
But take a look at the Dynamic vs. Static argument. For years, the Dynamic-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, so it's better", while the Static-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, but harder to maintain, hard to use with large teams". So now we have a study that doesn't even come close to addressing most of the issues that have been argued for years! Of course this isn't going to convince anyone.
"In fact, one of the few studies that people actually believe is the "some programmers are 10x better" study, and that was actually fairly well conducted - many students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them."
Can you by chance point me to this paper? I'd like to add it to my paper collection, since most of the studies I've seen concerning programmer variability use members of the workforce. I'm not aware of the one involving students, but such replication studies are easy to miss.
I'm not sure how that link helps me. I've already seen many of those studies. Which one satisfies, "students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them"?
That is the specific study I am searching for to add to my list of papers. Did you give me this link because you were referring to Humphrey (A Discipline for Software Engineering), or something else? I can track down Humphrey, but it will take me a few days, since it's a physical book.
My apologies. I misread what you were looking for. Mostly by not actually reading what you wrote. :(
Perhaps the previous author was thinking of the Prechelt "An Empirical Comparison of .." paper? http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf . Section 5.7 has "work times" for Java and C/C++ programmers using well-observed times. However, that is not for a "fairly large amount of time."
There is no such study. It's a well-regarded and popular myth.
Laurent Bossavit does a masterful job of researching the origins of this myth (and others) in his new book The Leprechauns of Software Engineering, available on LeanPub [1].
Not at all, that study was not well conducted, it compared people just learning to program with people that already had experience, in a time when programming was much different from what it is today... Just go read the damn paper...
The only problem is, people have been doing these experiments for 30 years, and do you know what the net effect it's had on the world of programmers: none at all. Saying "no no, this time really listen to this study" seems to be having no effect.
There are a lot of causes for this, not least of all the things you mention (nobody cares about science, people like or dislike based on non-scientific evidence).
But it's also because people know that all these studies are flawed. As much as I hate to be the "nitpicker" who takes apart studies, EVERY SINGLE STUDY on programming doesn't even come close to real-life scenarios. In fact, one of the few studies that people actually believe is the "some programmers are 10x better" study, and that was actually fairly well conducted - many students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them.
But take a look at the Dynamic vs. Static argument. For years, the Dynamic-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, so it's better", while the Static-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, but harder to maintain, hard to use with large teams". So now we have a study that doesn't even come close to addressing most of the issues that have been argued for years! Of course this isn't going to convince anyone.