Natural Programming

oct 2018 —

At VL/HCC'2018, our group will have 3 full papers, 2 posters, and a presentation in the DTSHPS'2018 Workshop.

aug 2018 —

New NSF grant called "Multimodal Conversational Assistant that Learns from Demonstrations" to support the work related to Sugilite.

jun 2018 —

New NSF grant called "Knowledge Acceleration for Programming" to support the work related to Unakite.

jun 2018 —

Most Influential Paper award at The 30th International Conference on Software Engineering -- ICSE'2018, for "Debugging, Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Program Behavior" by Andrew J. Ko and Brad A. Myers from 2008.

may 2018 —

Keynote address, WAPI: 1st International Workshop on API Usage and Evolution (https://w-api.github.io/), co-located with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, May 23, 2017. "Human-Centered Methods for Improving API Usability". local pdf and slides and Sven Amann’s summary of the talk.

feb 2018 and apr 2017 —

Google Faculty Research Awards for API Usability.

oct 2017 —

Most Influential Paper award over the last 10+/-1 years by the VL/HCC conference in 2017, for J. Stylos; B. A. Myers: "Mica..." from VL/HCC 2006. This is the 4th time our group has won this award!

more news...

The Natural Programming Project is working on making programming languages, APIs, and programming environments easier to learn, more effective, and less error prone. We are taking a human-centered approach, first studying how people perform their tasks and then designing languages, APIs, and environments around people's natural tendencies. We focus on all kinds of programming, including professional programmers, novice programmers who are trying to learn to be experts, and end-user programmers (EUPs), who program to support other jobs or hobbies, such as multimedia authoring, simulations, teaching, prototyping, and other activities supported by computing.

We have been affiliated with the EUSES consortium, which is a group of researchers working on end-user software engineering, and with the project on Variations to Support Exploratory Programming.

Ongoing Projects

API Usability

Informing API design choices through human-centered methods.

MARBLE

Mining API Repositories for Boilerplate Lessening Effort.
Mining Software Repositories for Boilerplate to help API Designers.

Alabaster

Autocomplete Letting Apache Beam Applications Succeed Through Exploration Rapidly
Research on helping programmers use the Apache Beam API.

Unakite

Users Need Accelerators for Knowledge for Implementations in Technology Environments
Research on helping programmers organize knowledge found on the web.

Obsidian

Object-oriented Blockchain State Interaction and Development Implementation And Notation
Research on a new language for programming blockchain programs.

Verdant and Variolite

Variations Augment Real Iterative Outcomes Letting Information Transcend Exploration.
Research on supporting exploratory programming for Data Scientists.

Sugilite and Epidosite and Appinite

Smartphone Users Generating Intelligent Likeable Interfaces Through Examples
Creating Smartphone scripts by example and speech.

Glacier

Great Languages Allow Class Immutability Easily and Readily.
System to enforce immutability in Java.

Former Projects

Moonstone

Making Object Oriented Novel Software Tools Optimized for Noting Exceptions.
Research on exception handling, and new plugin for Eclipse to help with exception handlers.

Aquamarine

Allowing Quick Undoing of Any Marks And Repairs to Improve Novel Editing
Painting program to explore selective undo using the script model.

Dacite

Design Annotations for Complementing Interfaces Targeting Effectiveness.
Plugin for Eclipse to help with API Usability.

Cryolite

Cloud9 Recorder of Your Operations by Listening to Interactions in The Editor.

Gneiss

Gathering Novel End-User Internet Services using Spreadsheets
Uses a spreadsheet language to create interactive web applications using web service data.

InterState

(Formerly called: Euclase: End User Centered Language, APIs, System, and Environment.)
New tool to allow designers to author web behaviors using state machines and constraints.

Azurite

Adding Zest to Undoing and Restoring Improves Textual Exploration
A plug-in for Eclipse that facilitates backtracking (undoing) of code.

Graphite

GRAphical Palettes Help Instantiate Types in the Editor.
A plug-in for Eclipse that supports type-specific palettes that help users enter code more easily.

Fluorite

Full of Low-level User Operations Recorded In The Editor.
A plug-in for Eclipse that records the low-level user and Eclipse events to enable analysis.