Zuzel Vera Pacheco, a Master Student at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Greg Wilson has been working on the Back-annotation of data models at run-time. For a short description of her project see also this presentation on Slideshare.

As part of this work, she has done a very interesting experiment in which she has analyzed the diagrams/notations that programmers use to represent the execution of database queries. Now, she is reporting the first results of the experiment showing that “there is not a single pair that uses the same notation”.

Definitely, something to think about. The next question would be: Are all programmers at least able to understand the representations used by their peers? If so, what’s the importance of standard notations? Do we all have an implicit knowledge that helps us to understand new notations? Is this “knowledge” an important factor when designing a new notation (imagine that our invented notation is counterintuitive and people make the wrong assumptions about it)?. Any opinions?

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