Through my research on the human side of programming, I have often drawn on the work of historians, psychologists, and computing pioneers to understand: how can tools support knowledge work? How can we be both more rigorous and more creative in dreaming up new notations, environments, and automations to help people think, learn, and communicate? I designed an undergraduate-level course at Brown, “Tools for Thought,” to distill a coherent conceptual foundation out of my messy bibliography. This course covers topics like spaced repetition, hypertext, spreadsheets, slideshows, and more. In this talk, I will discuss how I designed the course, what I’ve learned from its first iteration, and my philosophy on what PL has to offer to HCI and beyond.

Will Crichton is an assistant professor of computer science at Brown University. His research combines programming language theory and cognitive psychology to develop a science of the human factors of programming. Will creates both tools and methodologies to help developers learn and use our most sophisticated programming languages. His research systems for learning Rust have been used by over 100,000 developers to date. Will received his PhD from Stanford University in 2022 advised by Pat Hanrahan and Maneesh Agrawala, and he was a postdoc with Shriram Krishnamurthi before starting as a professor at Brown.