Agentsheets: a tool for building domain-oriented visual programming environments

ABSTRACT

Visual programming systems are supposed to simplify programming by capitalizing on innate human spatial reasoning skills. I argue that: (i) good visual programming environments should be oriented toward their application domains, and (ii) tools to build domain-oriented environments are needed because building such environments from scratch is very difficult. The demonstration illustrates how the visual programming system builder called Agentsheets addresses these issues and demonstrates several applications built using Agentsheets.

REFERENCES

• 1: G. Fischer and A. C. Lemke, "Construction Kits and Design Environments: Steps Toward Human Problem- Domain Communication," HCI, Vol. 3, pp. 179-222, 1988.
• 2: E. P. Glinert, M. M. Blattner and C. J. Freking, "Visual Tools and Languages: Directions for the '90s," 1991 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, Kobe, Japan, 1991, pp. 89-95.
• 3: E. P. Glinert, "i'owards "Second Generation" Interactive, Graphical Programming Environments," IEEE Computer Society, Workshop on Visual Languages, Dallas, 1986, pp. 61-70.
• 4: T. R. G. Green, M. Petre and R. K. E. BeUamy, "Comprehensibility of Visual and Textual Programs: A Test of Superlativism Against the qVIatch-Mismatch' Conjecture," Empirical Studies of Programmers: Fourth Workshop, New Brunswick, NJ, 1991, pp. 121- 146.
• 5: Alex Repenning , Tamara Sumner, Using Agentsheets to create a voice dialog design environment, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/SIGAPP symposium on Applied computing: technological challenges of the 1990's, p.1199-1207, March 1992, Kansas City, Missouri, United States [doi>10.1145/130069.130149]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.7 Visual Programming

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Animations
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Languages