Evaluating CoBlox

Weintrop, David; Afzal, Afsoon; Salac, Jean; Francis, Patrick; Li, Boyang; Shepherd, David; Franklin, Diana

doi:10.1145/3173574.3173940

Cited by 54 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Most work on structure editors has focused on the user interfaces that they present. This is important work-presenting a fluid user interface involving exclusively structural edit actions is a non-trivial problem that has not yet been fully resolved, though recent studies have started to show productivity gains for blocks-based structure editors like Scratch for novice programmers [Resnick et al 2009;Weintrop et al 2018;Weintrop and Wilensky 2015], and for keyboard-driven structure editors like mbeddr in professional programming settings [Asenov and Müller 2014;Voelter et al 2012Voelter et al , 2014. Some structure editors support live programming in various ways, e.g.…”

Section: Type Error Messagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live functional programming with typed holes

Omar

Voysey

Chugh

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Live programming environments aim to provide programmers (and sometimes audiences) with continuous feedback about a program's dynamic behavior as it is being edited. The problem is that programming languages typically assign dynamic meaning only to programs that are complete, i.e. syntactically well-formed and free of type errors. Consequently, live feedback presented to the programmer exhibits temporal or perceptive gaps. This paper confronts this "gap problem" from type-theoretic first principles by developing a dynamic semantics for incomplete functional programs, starting from the static semantics for incomplete functional programs developed in recent work on Hazelnut. We model incomplete functional programs as expressions with holes, with empty holes standing for missing expressions or types, and non-empty holes operating as membranes around static and dynamic type inconsistencies. Rather than aborting when evaluation encounters any of these holes as in some existing systems, evaluation proceeds around holes, tracking the closure around each hole instance as it flows through the remainder of the program. Editor services can use the information in these hole closures to help the programmer develop and confirm their mental model of the behavior of the complete portions of the program as they decide how to fill the remaining holes. Hole closures also enable a fill-and-resume operation that avoids the need to restart evaluation after edits that amount to hole filling. Formally, the semantics borrows machinery from both gradual type theory (which supplies the basis for handling unfilled type holes) and contextual modal type theory (which supplies a logical basis for hole closures), combining these and developing additional machinery necessary to continue evaluation past holes while maintaining type safety. We have mechanized the metatheory of the core calculus, called Hazelnut Live, using the Agda proof assistant.We have also implemented these ideas into the Hazel programming environment. The implementation inserts holes automatically, following the Hazelnut edit action calculus, to guarantee that every editor state has some (possibly incomplete) type. Taken together with this paper's type safety property, the result is a proof-of-concept live programming environment where rich dynamic feedback is truly available without gaps, i.e. for every reachable editor state.

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Section: Type Error Messagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live functional programming with typed holes

Omar

Voysey

Chugh

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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“…Related to our research is the work of Weintrop et al [37]. They created CoBlox, a block-based interface for programming a one-armed industrial robot.…”

Section: Block-based Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

XLBlocks: a Block-based Formula Editor for Spreadsheet Formulas

Jansen

Hermans

2019

2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Spreadsheets are frequently used in industry to support critical business decisions. Unfortunately, they also suffer from error-proneness, which sometimes results in costly consequences. Experiments in the field of program education have shown that programmers tend to make fewer errors and can better focus on the logic of a program if they use a block-based language instead of a textual one. We hypothesize that a blockbased formula editor could support spreadsheet users in a similar way. Therefore, we develop XLBlocks and conduct a thinkaloud study with 13 experienced spreadsheet users from industry. Participants are asked to create and edit several formulas, using our block-based language. We then ask them to evaluate this editor using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework. We found that for all dimensions the block-based formula editor received a better evaluation than the default text-based formula editor.

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“…The block based programming approach used by App Inventor is a key approach for teaching programming, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM), and indeed it foster students interest, motivation and empowerment, being usually chosen as entry-point language [2] and usually have a better performance with non-experts in programming [5]. More than that, it has been enabling enthusiasts to build real world prototypes, applications, innovations and business, such as XLBlocks [3], for spreadsheet formulas editor and CoBlox [4], a block-based programming interface for a single-armed industrial robot.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BIPES: Block Based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems

et al. 2020

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This article proposes the BIPES, a Block based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems, including its architecture, design and validation results. BIPES is an open source software and service that is freely available through the website http://www.bipes.net.br and has been conceived from our experience of several years teaching and developing embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It allows anyone to quickly and reliably design, program, build, deploy and monitor embedded systems, IoT devices and applications using blocks or Python based programming. It is fully based on web environment, so absolutely no software installation is needed on the client developer machine. In this way, a tablet, a netbook, a Chromebook or any other device can be used to program and test several types of devices. Mainly, it relies on MicroPython or CircuitPython, WebREPL, WebSockets, Web Serial API, HTML, JavaScript and Google Blockly to allow no-code programming (blocks) to be translated into Python code and then deployed to the target board. Moreover, it does not require server side processing, so it can be deployed as a Progressive Web Application (PWA), allowing it to be used even when the computer is offline. It is compatible with several low cost boards such as: mBed, BBC micro:bit, ESP8266, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi using only a web browser and without the need to install any software on the device where the user develops the programming.

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Evaluating CoBlox

Cited by 54 publications

References 28 publications

Live functional programming with typed holes

Live functional programming with typed holes

XLBlocks: a Block-based Formula Editor for Spreadsheet Formulas

BIPES: Block Based Integrated Platform for Embedded Systems

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