Invited research overview: end-user programming

Abstract

In the past few decades there has been considerable work on empowering end users to be able to write their own programs, and as a result, users are indeed doing so. In fact, we estimate that over 12 million people in American workplaces would say that they "do programming" at work, and almost 50 million people use spreadsheets or databases (and therefore may potentially program), compared to only 3 million professional programmers. The "programming" systems used by these end users include spreadsheet systems, web authoring tools, business process authoring tools such as Visual Basic, graphical languages for demonstrating the desired behavior of educational simulations, and even professional languages such as Java. The motivation for end-user programming is to have the computer be useful for each person's specific individual needs. While the empirical study of programming has been an HCI topic since the beginning the field, it is only recently that there has been a focus on the End-User Programmer as a separate class from novices who are assumed to be studying to be professional programmers. Another recent focus is on making end-user programming more reliable, using "End-User Software Engineering." This paper gives a brief summary of some current and past research in the area of End-User Programming.