More natural end-user software engineering

Abstract

The "Natural Programming" project at Carnegie Mellon University has been working for more than 10 years to make programming more "natural", or closer to the way people think. We have addressed the needs of all kinds of programmers: novices, professionals and end-user programmers. Many studies were performed which provided new insights and led to new models of programmers. From these insights and models, we created new programming languages and environments. Evaluations of the resulting systems have shown that they are effective and successful. This paper provides an overview of the entire 10-year Natural Programming project, but focuses on our new results since WEUSE-III in Dagstuhl.