General-Purpose Visual Language and Information System with Case-Studies in Developing Business Applications
This work addresses the problem of programming accessibility for novice learners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visual programming language research.
The thesis tackled the challenge of learning computer programming by developing PWCT, a general-purpose visual programming language, which has achieved over 230,000 downloads and been used to create business applications and other programming languages like Supernova and Ring.
Learning computer programming has been always challenging. Since the sixties of the last century, many researchers developed Visual Programming Languages (VPLs) to help in this regard. In this thesis, ten VPLs were specifically selected, studied, experimented with, and evaluated. A total of fifteen metrics were used to evaluate the tools. Comparisons, classification, and gap analysis were then presented. A list of requirements for a general-purpose VPL and a guide to help the novice programmer choose the right tool were generated and finally the PWCT (Programming Without Coding Technology, a novel general-purpose visual programming language) is developed and presented. PWCT has been launched as a Sourceforge project, which currently has more than 230,000 downloads for the language and more than 19,500,000 downloads for samples, tutorials and movies. Many business applications and projects are developed using PWCT, Also we developed the Supernova programming language and the Ring programming language using PWCT to prove that it can be used for advanced and large projects. Feedback from developers and results from the studies indicate that PWCT is a very appealing, competitive, and powerful language.