CS2125 Paper Review Form - Winter 2018

Reviewer: Mikhail Berezovskiy

Paper Title: #12 Why Looking Isn’t Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming

Author(s): MARIAN PETRE

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [v] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [v] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [v] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [v] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [v] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [v] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)
   This article describes relevance and usability of graphical "secondary notation", from novice and expert point of view. It gives us clue about different approach of novice and experts of reading, arranging, linking, and perceiving information based on text and graphics. Point to problems that should be considered before applying graphical notation. Highlight that reading and representing graphics is another skill and should be developed accordingly.


8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)
 - Distinguish exactly less and more experienced behavior of recognition of secondary notation. That there no general implementation, its specific based on reader skills.
 - Describes strengths and weaknesses of graphical notation. It can be a powerful tool but harder to apply in 'good' way
 - Looks slightly like an opposition to graphical notation, but still can be considered as critical review based on external articles and research.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)
 - I found this article mostly cover cases of how programmers expose information to other programmers, but not to external users, such as domain experts. Which is not necessarily a weakness of article, but one of the meaningful purpose of graphical notation