PLIERS: A Process that Integrates User-Centered Methods into Programming Language Design
This addresses usability challenges in programming language design for developers, though it is incremental as it adapts existing HCI methods rather than introducing a new paradigm.
The authors tackled the problem of impractical HCI methods for programming language design by developing PLIERS, a user-centered process that integrates adapted formative and summative methods, and demonstrated its effectiveness by designing two new languages where programmers achieved effective programming after short training periods.
Programming language design requires making many usability-related design decisions. However, existing HCI methods can be impractical to apply to programming languages: they have high iteration costs, programmers require significant learning time, and user performance has high variance. To address these problems, we adapted both formative and summative HCI methods to make them more suitable for programming language design. We integrated these methods into a new process, PLIERS, for designing programming languages in a user-centered way. We evaluated PLIERS by using it to design two new programming languages. Glacier extends Java to enable programmers to express immutability properties effectively and easily. Obsidian is a language for blockchains that includes verification of critical safety properties. Summative usability studies showed that programmers were able to program effectively in both languages after short training periods.