Pane found that participants rarely used explicit looping and always used one-sided conditionals. Pane went further, to characterize the style of programming that the participants used. He found that over half of the participants’ task statements were in the form of production rules, as in the example. He also saw the use of constraints and imperative statements, but little evidence of object-oriented thinking. Participants did talk about accessing behaviors built into an entity, but rarely from the perspective of that entity; instead, it was from the perspective of the player or the programmer. He found no evidence of participants describing categories of entities (defining classes), inheritance, or polymorphism.

Programming may be more difficult than necessary because it requires solutions to be expressed in ways that are not familiar or natural for beginners. To identify what is natural, this article examines the ways that non-programmers express solutions to problems that were chosen to be representative of common programming tasks. The vocabulary and structure in these solutions is compared with the vocabulary and structure in modern programming languages, to identify the features and paradigms that seem to match these natural tendencies as well as those that do not. This information can be used by the designers of future programming languages to guide the selection and generation of language features. This design technique can result in languages that are easier to learn and use, because the languages will better match beginners’ existing problem solving abilities.