Touching factor: Software development on tablets

Abstract

Mobile devices have been making their way into our everyday life for quite some time, and especially the market for tablets is increasing. They are used at home for entertainment purposes as well as in professional environments, helping to ensure productivity. A large and constantly growing amount of apps for basically every task is available. With one exemption: programmers are still bound to the classic PC setup and hardly use a tablet for software development. The reason for this is simple: their tool chain does not fit the small screens. The space constraints on tablets demand a paradigm shift. We propose a prototype sketch of a development environment based on a concatenative programming language. Concatenative programming has a strong focus on composing words out of other words, supporting a minimalistic and concise approach to programming. This approach perfectly fits into the mobile world and allows developers to write programs for tablets on tablets. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.