End-user programming in the wild: A field study of CoScripter scripts

Authors:
Christopher Bogart;Margaret Burnett;Allen Cypher;Christopher Scaffidi
Affiliations:
Oregon State University, USA;Oregon State University, USA;IBM Almaden Research, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Venue:
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Although a new class of languages has emerged to enable end users to create their own web applications, little is known about how end-user programmers actually use such languages in the real world. In this paper, we report a field study on over 1400 scripts collected from the internet which were created by early adopters of CoScripter, a web macro programming-by-demonstration language. We contrast these internet scripts with those written by users inside IBM, and describe script usage and re-usage patterns, features used, and users’ clever workarounds for features not present in the language. The results show how users grapple with such programming notions as repetition, generalization, and reuse, sometimes inventing their own devices for these. Finally, we discuss the many scripts we found with social implications, whose purposes were to circumvent intended rules, regulations, and usage norm assumptions of a number of web sites.