Among other things, it really shows how reasoning about computer programs is not intuitive to people, even people who've had years of training (the class is an optional class mostly taken by 3rd/4th year CS majors, with 10% grad students)
@danluu IIRC they've made up their own programming language for this, so maybe the correct conclusion is "our programming language works differently than the students are used to from previous experience".
@danluu This is interesting but it would be even more notable if this was done with different languages. I agree with part of the conclusion that if the majority of programmers converge on a certain misunderstanding, maybe we should change how the system works. Kind of like changing an API after working with it for awhile and realizing it's not ergonomic.
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