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Maniposynth: Bimodal Tangible Functional Programming

Authors Brian Hempel, Ravi Chugh

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Brian Hempel
  • University of Chicago, IL, USA
Ravi Chugh
  • University of Chicago, IL, USA

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. NSF grant Direct Manipulation Programming Systems (CCF-1651794).

Acknowledgements

We extend our gratitude to Justin Lubin for advice (so far ignored) about caching during synthesis, Byron Zhang for feedback on the presentation, Matt Teichman for providing hardware, Kartik Singhal for technical support, and the user study participants for their great patience with bugs and for the invaluable feedback they provided.

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Brian Hempel and Ravi Chugh. Maniposynth: Bimodal Tangible Functional Programming. In 36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 222, pp. 16:1-16:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.16

Abstract

Traditionally, writing code is a non-graphical, abstract, and linear process. Not everyone is comfortable with this way of thinking at all times. Can programming be transformed into a graphical, concrete, non-linear activity? While nodes-and-wires [Sutherland, 1966] and blocks-based [Begel, 1996] programming environments do leverage graphical direct manipulation, users perform their manipulations on abstract syntax tree elements, which are still abstract. Is it possible to be more concrete - could users instead directly manipulate live program values to create their program?
We present a system, Maniposynth, that reimagines functional programming as a non-linear workflow where program expressions are spread on a 2D canvas. The live results of those expressions are continuously displayed and available for direct manipulation. The non-linear canvas liberates users to work out-of-order, and the live values can be interacted with via drag-and-drop. Incomplete programs are gracefully handled via hole expressions, which allow Maniposynth to offer program synthesis. Throughout the workflow, the program is valid OCaml code which the user may inspect and edit in their preferred text editor at any time.
With Maniposynth’s direct manipulation features, we created 38 programs drawn from a functional data structures course. We additionally hired two professional OCaml developers to implement a subset of these programs. We report on these experiences and discuss to what degree Maniposynth meets its goals of providing a non-linear, concrete, graphical programming workflow.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Integrated and visual development environments
  • Software and its engineering → Visual languages
  • Software and its engineering → Programming by example
  • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI)
Keywords
  • direct manipulation
  • tangible programming
  • programming user interfaces

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