Metafor: visualizing stories as code

Abstract

Every program tells a story. Programming, then, is the art of constructing a story about the objects in the program and what they do in various situations. So-called programming languages, while easy for the computer to accurately convert into code, are, unfortunately, difficult for people to write and understand.We explore the idea of using descriptions in a natural language as a representation for programs. While we cannot yet convert arbitrary English to fully specified code, we can use a reasonably expressive subset of English as a visualization tool. Simple descriptions of program objects and their behavior generate scaffolding (underspecified) code fragments, that can be used as feedback for the designer. Roughly speaking, noun phrases can be interpreted as program objects; verbs can be functions, adjectives can be properties. A surprising amount of what we call programmatic semantics can be inferred from linguistic structure. We present a program editor, Metafor, that dynamically converts a user's stories into program code, and in a user study, participants found it useful as a brainstorming tool.