Design requirements for more flexible structured editors from a study of programmers' text editing

ABSTRACT

A detailed study of Java programmers' text editing found that the full flexibility of unstructured text was not utilized for the vast majority of programmers' character-level edits. Rather, programmers used a small set of editing patterns to achieve their modifications, which accounted for all of the edits observed in the study. About two-thirds of the edits were of name and list structures and most edits preserved structure except for temporary omissions of delimiters. These findings inform the design of a new class of more flexible structured program editors that may avoid well-known usability problems of traditional structured editors, while providing more sophisticated support such as more universal code completion and smarter copy and paste.

REFERENCES

• 1: Kelleher, C., Cosgrove, D., Culyba, D., Forlines, C., Pratt, J., and Pausch, R., Alice2: Programming without Syntax Errors, User Interface Software and Technology, Paris, France, 2002.
• 2: Andrew J. Ko , Htet Aung , Brad A. Myers, Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062492]
• 3: Miller, P., Pane, J., Meter, G., and Vorthmann, S., Evolution of Novice Programming Environments: The Structure Editors of Carnegie Mellon University, Interactive Learning Environments, 4, 2, 140--158, 1994.
• 4: Tim Teitelbaum , Thomas Reps, The Cornell program synthesizer: a syntax-directed programming environment, Communications of the ACM, v.24 n.9, p.563-573, Sept. 1981 [doi>10.1145/358746.358755]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Keywords:
interaction techniques, structured editors