Computer Science Seminar
Friday, 28 March - 3:00 PM
Rekhi 214

Benjamin Bandt-Horn
Visual Programming Languages

The possibility of universal programmability and implications of future-proof language design on the
global community.

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The heyday of serious VPL research has come and gone without a tear shed. Terrific concepts and entire
systems were developed, few with resounding influence on the way software is actually created.

This brief heritage and the potential legacy of visual programming languages are invoked, with one wild
eye seeking pie-in-the-sky: "omni-lingual collaboration," and another set squarely on designing something
that we could actually implement and use.


A half-dozen shipping application designs will be evaluated for their fitness as general purpose
collaborative programming environments. Addressing some of their common shortcomings, a modestly simple
yet novel interface is proposed as a solution to a particularly difficult collaboration scenario.