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Coding at the speed of touch

Published: 22 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Although programming is one of the most creative things that one can do with a computer, there is currently no way to make programs on an increasingly popular class of tablet computers. Tablets appear unable to support capable (proficient) programming experiences because of their small form factor and touch-centric input method. This paper demonstrates how co-design of a programming language, YinYang, and its environment can overcome these challenges to enable do-it-yourself game creation on tablets. YinYang's programming model is based on tile and behavior constructs that simplify program structure for effective display and input on tablets, and also supports the definition and safe reuse of new abstractions to be competitive with capable programming languages. This paper details YinYang's design and evaluates our initial experience through a prototype that runs on current tablet hardware.

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  • (2019)Mobile Devices in Programming ContextsProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3322323(1109-1122)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
  • (2018)The design and evaluation of a gestural keyboard for entering programming code on mobile devices2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506501(49-56)Online publication date: Oct-2018
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cover image ACM Conferences
Onward! 2011: Proceedings of the 10th SIGPLAN symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software
October 2011
134 pages
ISBN:9781450309417
DOI:10.1145/2048237
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. behavior
  2. tiles
  3. touch

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Modelling on mobile devicesSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-021-00897-8Online publication date: 29-Jun-2021
  • (2019)Mobile Devices in Programming ContextsProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3322323(1109-1122)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
  • (2018)The design and evaluation of a gestural keyboard for entering programming code on mobile devices2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506501(49-56)Online publication date: Oct-2018
  • (2017)Syntax-directed keyboard extension: Evolution and evaluation2017 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VLHCC.2017.8103480(285-289)Online publication date: Oct-2017
  • (2015)Representation-Plurality in Multi-Touch Mobile Visual Programming for MusicProceedings of the international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression10.5555/2993778.2993872(369-373)Online publication date: 30-May-2015
  • (2015)CEL: Touching software modeling in essence2015 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER.2015.7081854(439-448)Online publication date: Mar-2015
  • (2013)CEL: modeling everywhereProceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering10.5555/2486788.2486996(1323-1326)Online publication date: 18-May-2013
  • (2013)How to study programming on mobile touch devicesProceedings of the 13th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/2526968.2526974(51-58)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2013
  • (2013)CEL: Modeling everywhere2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606708(1323-1326)Online publication date: May-2013
  • (2012)Escaping the maze of twisty classesProceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software10.1145/2384592.2384605(127-138)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
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