I'd be interested to know what the state of the literature is on
VPLs, especially in comparison against text languages. I haven't
been able to find a recent survey, any recommendations?
Excellent introductory visual languages are Scratch
(http://scratch.mid.edu), Alice (http://www.alice.org/) and StarLogo
TNG (http://education.mit.edu/projects/starlogo-tng). They are
describer in several papers (mainly by ACM).
If you don't find references I can send them to you.
Stefano
Citando Dan Stowell <dan.stow...@eecs.qmul.ac.uk>:
Hi,
I'm fairly new to the PP literature. Thomas's self-promotion led me
to his interesting 1996 paper on visual programming languages.
"Overall, we believe that in many respects VPLs offer substantial
gains over conventional textual languages, but at present their HCI
aspects are still under-developed. Improvements in secondary
notation, in editing, and in searching will greatly raise their
overall usability."
As someone who does a lot of work in textual languages - in
particular, livecoding - I'd be interested to know what the state of
the literature is on VPLs, especially in comparison against text
languages. I haven't been able to find a recent survey, any
recommendations?
(Also, as someone who has had RSI, I wonder about the accessibility
of VPLs via purely keyboard control...)
Best
Dan
On 01/03/2011 17:32, Thomas Green wrote:
Er, a spot of self-promotion here ..... the various types of comparison
I did in the past led to a framework which attempts to make some sense
of the underlying trade-offs, the cognitive dimensions framework,
developed by me and lots of other people. Stefano, if you simply want to
know whether your new tool works, then you probably just need to do an
experiment and stop; but if you want to know why it works (or doesn't),
you might take a look at that framework. There's a resources page here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/CognitiveDimensions/
CDs analysis is quite quick, though very vague. It's actually quite
possible that it would reveal problems you've overlooked .....
Thomas
--
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an
exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland
(SC 038302).
--
Dan Stowell
Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Centre for Digital Music
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/people/dans.htm
http://www.mcld.co.uk/
Stefano Federici
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Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione
Dipartimento di Scienze Pedagogiche e Filosofiche
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