Keyword programming for TouchDevelop

Authors:
Vu Le;Jonathan de Halleux;Sumit Gulwani;Zhendong Su
Affiliations:
University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;University of California at Davis, Davis, CA, USA
Venue:
Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Year:
2013

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Abstract

This video demo features a new keyword programming environment for TouchDevelop, a popular touch-centric system for scripting mobile devices. The new environment allows users to simply enter a set of keywords, and its internal program synthesis engine automatically generates script snippets that most likely reflect the users' intent. Because the synthesis engine can be triggered anywhere in a script, it also exploits various contextual information, such as which variables/functions are in-scope, to guide the generation of snippets. Our new environment benefit both novice and experienced TouchDevelop users. It helps novice users to synthesize script snippets from keywords and explore unfamiliar TouchDevelop features. It also improves experienced users' productivity because they need to worry about fewer coding details and enter less code. The demoed feature has been released and deployed since TouchDevelop version 2.10.