Pliers

Abstract

Programming language design requires making many usability-related design decisions. However, existing HCI methods can be impractical to apply to programming languages: languages have high iteration costs, programmers require significant learning time, and user performance has high variance. To address these problems, we adapted both formative and summative HCI methods to make them more suitable for programming language design. We integrated these methods into a new process, PLIERS, for designing programming languages in a user-centered way. We assessed PLIERS by using it to design two new programming languages. Glacier extends Java to enable programmers to express immutability properties effectively and easily. Obsidian is a language for blockchains that includes verification of critical safety properties. Empirical studies showed that the PLIERS process resulted in languages that could be used effectively by many programmers and revealed additional opportunities for language improvement.

Programming Language Case Studies Can Be Deep

“…Notable works within this area include the Whyline [30], a debugger with explanations, and the study of natural programming [43], i.e., based on programming user studies where the subjects have no prior conceptions of programming to bias their experiences. In recent years, this line of work has been operationalized in the PLIERS design framework [12].…”

Using Reactive Synthesis: An End-to-End Exploratory Case Study

“…A potentially significant outcome of research efforts on the comprehension of specifications can be translated to a better design of specification languages, perhaps inspired by the work on natural programming [12], [58], a PL and HCI design methodology that is aimed to "make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about them".…”

“…It is essential to point out that while recent studies identified the need for human-centered design of programming languages [9], [12], [58] and formal methods techniques [37], there was no such study in the context of reactive synthesis. Moreover, there is a large body of work on HCI and synthesis; however, these works are focused mostly on inductive synthesis techniques such as programming by example (PbE) and programming by demonstration (PbD), which are fundamentally different than reactive synthesis from a formal specification.…”