And one of the things that is disturbingly true about most novices on computers is that about 2 pages of program is the maximum they can handle. They like to spread it out, use their visual field as an extension of their short term memory
–Alan Kay From Doing With Images Makes Symbols
A few thoughts on this phenomenon.
A denser, more concise, less “English like” programming language would counter-intuitivly be easier for novices to use, if it let them keep their project below the 2-page limit.
Does this limit increase with more and bigger displays?
Do graphical programming language change anything? It seems like they might “scale” better on a very large display. But in my (albeit limited) experience they are much less compact then textual source code. And it’s not clear to me they support abstraction as well.