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SandBlocks
(2020)
Visuelle Programmiersprachen werden heutzutage zugunsten textueller Programmiersprachen nahezu nicht verwendet, obwohl visuelle Programmiersprachen einige Vorteile bieten. Diese reichen von der Vermeidung von Syntaxfehlern, über die Nutzung konkreter domänenspezifischer Notation bis hin zu besserer Lesbarkeit und Wartbarkeit des Programms. Trotzdem greifen professionelle Softwareentwickler nahezu ausschließlich auf textuelle Programmiersprachen zurück.
Damit Entwickler diese Vorteile visueller Programmiersprachen nutzen können, aber trotzdem nicht auf die ihnen bekannten textuellen Programmiersprachen verzichten müssen, gibt es die Idee, textuelle und visuelle Programmelemente gemeinsam in einer Programmiersprache nutzbar zu machen. Damit ist dem Entwickler überlassen wann und wie er visuelle Elemente in seinem Programmcode verwendet.
Diese Arbeit stellt das SandBlocks-Framework vor, das diese gemeinsame Nutzung visueller und textueller Programmelemente ermöglicht. Neben einer Auswertung visueller Programmiersprachen, zeigt es die technische Integration visueller Programmelemente in das Squeak/Smalltalk-System auf, gibt Einblicke in die Umsetzung und Verwendung in Live-Programmiersystemen und diskutiert ihre Verwendung in unterschiedlichen Domänen.
Squimera
(2017)
Software development tools that work and behave consistently across different programming languages are helpful for developers, because they do not have to familiarize themselves with new tooling whenever they decide to use a new language. Also, being able to combine multiple programming languages in a program increases reusability, as developers do not have to recreate software frameworks and libraries in the language they develop in and can reuse existing software instead.
However, developers often have a broad choice with regard to tools, some of which are designed for only one specific programming language. Various Integrated Development Environments have support for multiple languages, but are usually unable to provide a consistent programming experience due to different features of language runtimes. Furthermore, common mechanisms that allow reuse of software written in other languages usually use the operating system or a network connection as the abstract layer. Tools, however, often cannot support such indirections well and are therefore less useful in debugging scenarios for example.
In this report, we present a novel approach that aims to improve the programming experience with regard to working with multiple high-level programming languages. As part of this approach, we reuse the tools of a Smalltalk programming environment for other languages and build a multi-language virtual execution environment which is able to provide the same runtime capabilities for all languages.
The prototype system Squimera is an implementation of our approach and demonstrates that it is possible to reuse development tools, so that they behave in the same way across all supported programming languages. In addition, it provides convenient means to reuse and even mix software libraries and frameworks written in different languages without breaking the debugging experience.
In 1997, Henry Lieberman stated that debugging is the dirty little secret of computer science. Since then, several promising debugging technologies have been developed such as back-in-time debuggers and automatic fault localization methods. However, the last study about the state-of-the-art in debugging is still more than 15 years old and so it is not clear whether these new approaches have been applied in practice or not. For that reason, we investigate the current state of debugging in a comprehensive study. First, we review the available literature and learn about current approaches and study results. Second, we observe several professional developers while debugging and interview them about their experiences. Third, we create a questionnaire that serves as the basis for a larger online debugging survey. Based on these results, we present new insights into debugging practice that help to suggest new directions for future research.
Creating fonts is a complex task that requires expert knowledge in a variety of domains. Often, this knowledge is not held by a single person, but spread across a number of domain experts. A central concept needed for designing fonts is the glyph, an elemental symbol representing a readable character. Required domains include designing glyph shapes, engineering rules to combine glyphs for complex scripts and checking legibility. This process is most often iterative and requires communication in all directions. This report outlines a platform that aims to enhance the means of communication, describes our prototyping process, discusses complex font rendering and editing in a live environment and an approach to generate code based on a user’s live-edits.
Scrollytellings are an innovative form of web content. Combining the benefits of books, images, movies, and video games, they are a tool to tell compelling stories and provide excellent learning opportunities. Due to their multi-modality, creating high-quality scrollytellings is not an easy task. Different professions, such as content designers, graphics designers, and developers, need to collaborate to get the best out of the possibilities the scrollytelling format provides. Collaboration unlocks great potential. However, content designers cannot create scrollytellings directly and always need to consult with developers to implement their vision. This can result in misunderstandings. Often, the resulting scrollytelling will not match the designer’s vision sufficiently, causing unnecessary iterations. Our project partner Typeshift specializes in the creation of individualized scrollytellings for their clients. Examined existing solutions for authoring interactive content are not optimally suited for creating highly customized scrollytellings while still being able to manipulate all their elements programmatically. Based on their experience and expertise, we developed an editor to author scrollytellings in the lively.next live-programming environment. In this environment, a graphical user interface for content design is combined with powerful possibilities for programming behavior with the morphic system. The editor allows content designers to take on large parts of the creation process of scrollytellings on their own, such as creating the visible elements, animating content, and fine-tuning the scrollytelling. Hence, developers can focus on interactive elements such as simulations and games. Together with Typeshift, we evaluated the tool by recreating an existing scrollytelling and identified possible future enhancements. Our editor streamlines the creation process of scrollytellings. Content designers and developers can now both work on the same scrollytelling. Due to the editor inside of the lively.next environment, they can both work with a set of tools familiar to them and their traits. Thus, we mitigate unnecessary iterations and misunderstandings by enabling content designers to realize large parts of their vision of a scrollytelling on their own. Developers can add advanced and individual behavior. Thus, developers and content designers benefit from a clearer distribution of tasks while keeping the benefits of collaboration.
Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms; popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained.
To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.