Criteria for Evaluation of Visual Programming Languages

Abstract

Interest in visual programming languages has increased as graphic support in hardware and software has made display and manipulation of visual images, icons, diagrams, and forms reasonable to consider. In this paper, we present a set of evaluation criteria and associated metrics to judge visual programming languages. The five criteria, visual nature, functionality, ease of comprehension, paradigm support, and scalability, are intended to capture the essence of a general purpose visual programming language. These criteria are supplemented with a set of subjective metrics, resulting in an evaluation method that can be used to assess the quality of an individual visual programming language, or to compare among elements of a set of such languages.