Mike Travers thesis

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 10:39:00 -0400 (EDT)
   From: Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>
   
   Henning von Rosen wrote:
   
   > [Travers]
   > this text is of high relevancy to language design. A must-read!
   > and it does a great job of clarifying and justifying the role of 
   > metaphorical thinking in CS/lang-des.
   
   For those of us with less time to read an entire dissertation, perhaps
   you could point us to one or two conference and journal papers (you
   know, the usual peer-review stuff) that summarize his contribution?
   
I checked with Travers and this is what he says:

   Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 19:41:22 -0700
   From: Michael Travers <mt@alum.mit.edu>

   Short answer: no. I haven't been very good about turning my thesis
   into papers. There's a conference paper summarizing the visual object
   system that was part of the thesis:
      http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mt/papers/chi94/chi94.html

   But most people seem to be interested in the sections that apply
   cognitive metaphor theory to programming language design.  This is
   covered by chapters 2 & 3. To summarize: I apply a variety of
   psychological theories, chiefly the cognitive metaphor theory put
   forth by George Lakoff and collaborators, to the problem of how people
   conceptualize programs and programming languages. Then I go into more
   detail about a particular set of metaphors centered around the idea of
   agency and animism, which are pervasive in discourse about
   computation.

   If it's not obvious from the above, the thesis strays widely from the
   conventions of standard computer science. Some people like this sort
   of thing, and others hate it.  The former will probably enjoy reading
   the first three chapters.

   Mike

   PS: feel free to forward this to the mailing list.

-- Dan