SHF: Small: A Mechanism for Extending A Programming Language with Interactive Syntax

软件开发人员将程序写成线性文本。目前，这种编程方式是工业上指导计算机的主要方式。虽然计算机并不关心输入指令的格式，但对于开发人员来说，格式非常重要，因为开发人员必须在几个月后才能阅读程序以理解和改进代码。问题是，大量的线性程序文本描述了程序问题域的不同部分之间的几何关系，比如地图的一部分或信息的表格排列。对于软件开发人员来说，没有任何努力可以用文本的方式来表达这种关系，从而使它们易于破译。这个项目的目标是证明文本可视化编程的形式将大大改善开发人员之间的沟通。该项目开发了一种机制，以视觉和交互元素补充文本编程语言：微型图形用户界面。使用这种机制，开发人员可以为特定的问题域（例如，条件操作的二维表）创建迷你gui。其他开发人员将这些迷你gui的实例添加到他们的代码中，并与它们交互以输入特定的细节。当代码应该运行时，翻译程序与这些视觉元素协作，将它们呈现为普通指令。当代码被阅读时，视觉性质比线性文本更直接地表达几何关系。项目团队将跨几十个应用领域评估该机制。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Software developers write programs as linear text. At the moment, this way of programming is the dominant way of instructing computers in industry. While the computer does not care in which format instructions are entered, the format greatly matters to the developer who must read a program many months later to understand and improve the code. The problem is that a good amount of this linear program text describes geometric relationships among different pieces of the program's problem domain, say a piece of a map or a tabular arrangement of information. No effort on the part of a software developer can ever express such relationships in a textual way that makes them easy to decipher. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that form of textual-visual programming will greatly improve the communication between developers across time.The project develops a mechanism for supplementing textual programming languages with visual and interactive elements: miniature graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Using this mechanism, developers can create mini GUIs for specific problem domains such as, for example, two-dimension tables of conditional actions. Other developers add instances of these mini-GUIs to their code and interact with them to enter specific details. When the code is supposed to be run, the translator collaborates with these visual elements to render them as ordinary instructions. When the code is to be read, the visual nature expresses the geometric relationships much more directly than linear text. The project team will evaluate the mechanism across several dozen application areas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.