User Testing and the Design of AppleScript

William Cook, from the University of Texas at Austin, has a draft of his paper “AppleScript“, which discusses the history of the language and some of the decisions that went into its design.

Something that particularly interested me was their use of usability testing the language:

3. Given the handler:

on doit from x to y with z
  return (x ∗ y) + z
end doit

What does the following statement evaluate to?

doit with 3 from 8 to 5

1. 29
2. 43
3. error
4. other:

Please state which of the following AppleScript statements you prefer.

1. • put "a", {"b", "c"} into x
   • put {"a", {"b", "c"}} into x
2. • window named "fred"
   • window "fred"
3. • window 1
   • window #1
4. • word 34
   • word #34
5. • "apple" < "betty"
   • "apple" comes before "betty"

This incredibly simple questionnaire guided the language designers in their task to create a language suitable for casual programmers. Why don’t we do similar things with ‘proper’ languages?