Why is is called "E-Prime"?

[cogneuro]

I actually just met the creator of e-prime (!!!) a couple weeks ago and
should have asked him this!

Dr. Schneider just told me that he just wanted to create a software program
that made making experiments easier and it just happened from there :) (he
used to be an engineer).

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:14 AM, David McFarlane <mcfarla9 at msu.edu> wrote:

> Curious minds want to know.  So, I went ahead and posted this question to
> PST Web Support (as I keep saying, they really do generously take any and
> all questions there, and they did reply within 2 days).  Laura McCarthy
> replied, "E-Prime refers to the Experimenter's Prime (best) development
> studio for the implementation of computerized behavioral research such as
> reaction time, detection, and learning type paradigms."  She does not have a
> source citation for this, and neither do I -- I might have seen this
> explained in one of the early published papers introducing E-Prime, or in
> some of the early documentation for the beta versions that we started using
> back in 1998 or 1999. I might go back sometime and look further, but this
> should do for now.
>
> -- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
>
>
> At 5/23/2011 02:20 PM Monday, in the thread "E-DataAid crashing" (
> http://groups.google.com/group/e-prime/browse_thread/thread/2351146132d184ea),  David McFarlane wrote:
>
>> At 5/23/2011 11:55 AM Monday, Michiel Spape wrote:
>>
>>> As a side note, does anyone else think e-Prime should, in this i-Age,
>>> change the name? I'm personally of the opinion that Me-Prime sounds better
>>> (although perhaps a bit too late, as YouTube, MySpace and YouGov have all
>>> lost that glossiness... Gee-Prime and /i/-Prime will probably end up to be
>>> rather costly).
>>>
>>
>> As I recall, the name "E-Prime" was meant to evoke "Experiment-Prime",
>> i.e., "Experiment'", somewhat in the fashion of Isaac Newton's notation for
>> derivatives; and so "E-Prime" was meant to evoke a system that advances
>> experiments to the next level.  But I don't know where I read that, and I
>> can't find a citation now.
>>
>> I was never fond of this affectation (just like I was never fond of PST
>> calling experiment programs "paradigms", or calling VBA/E-Basic source code
>> "script", etc.).  But I understand the name, and in that sense I suppose
>> E-Prime makes more sense than <any other letter>-Prime.
>>
>> Just my US$.02,
>> -- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
>>
>
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