Why is is called "E-Prime"?

[David McFarlane]

Interesting.  Did Dr. Schneider also explain that before E-Prime he 
produced MEL (Microcomputer Experiment Laboratory), a rather 
successful product that ran under DOS?  Or that E-Prime started as a 
joint venture with Brian MacWhinney (head of this very discussion 
board, and STEP) at Carnegie Mellon University to bring some of the 
ideas from MacWhinney's PsyScope on the Macintosh over to the Windows 
platform?  There's some interesting history behind E-Prime, as for most things.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder


At 5/26/2011 02:06 PM Thursday, you wrote:
>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 
><<mailto:mcfarla9 at msu.edu>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>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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