Why is is called "E-Prime"?

[cogneuro]

He did mention MEL briefly but that was pretty much it. I was mostly asking
questions about his neuroscience research :)

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 2:20 PM, David McFarlane <mcfarla9 at msu.edu> wrote:

> 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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