More Natural Programming Languages and Environments

Abstract

Over the last six years, we have been working to create programming languages and environments that are more natural, by which we mean closer to the way people think about their tasks. The goal is to make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about them. To achieve this, we performed various studies about howpeople think about programming tasks, and then used this knowledge to develop a new programming language and environment called HANDS. This chapter provides an overviewof the goals and background for the Natural Programming research, the results of some of our user studies, and the highlights of the language design.