Drawings on napkins, video-game animation, and other ways to program computers
Ken Kahn · Communications of the ACM · 1996
P ROGRAMMERS usually type characters on a keyboard to enter, test, and debug computer programs.More than 30 years ago researchers began augmenting those characters with diagrams [20] but pure ASCII text is still the ubiquitous standard.We will argue that these attempts to make programming more visual have failed to become mainstream because they are too conservative.Various radical syntaxes for programs are feasible and offer many advantages over the state of the art.Programs, for example, can be defined by the topology of sketches, even hand-drawn scanned sketches [8].A programming environment can parse these sketches and generate animations of the drawings that evolve as the program executes [6].Or programs can be defined by manipulating physical objects, for example, by connecting blocks together [21] or inserting plastic cards into slots [17].We are currently building a system called ToonTalk in which programs are created, run, and debugged in a manner that closely resembles playing a video game [7].In the near future we may see program development systems that exist only in virtual reality or ones that interpret gestures in the real world.Program sources need not be static collections of text or even Drawings on Napkins, Video-Game Animation, a nd Other Ways t o Program Computers K e n K a h n •Programming can be as easy as child's play.