NYI award: visual programming languages
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Testing Homogeneous Spreadsheet Grids with the "What You See Is What You Test" Methodology
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm
Journal of Functional Programming
Subtext: uncovering the simplicity of programming
OOPSLA '05 Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
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Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used visual programming languages (VPLs) today, most are very limited compared to other VPLs, supporting only a few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the latter problem, but incorporating these mechanisms in a traditional way would introduce concepts foreign to spreadsheets, such as message passing. In this paper, we present similarity inheritance, a new approach to inheritance that is suitable for seamless integration into the spreadsheet paradigm. We first explain the model independently of any implementation, and then present a prototype implementation in the research spreadsheet VPL Forms/3. We show that bringing inheritance functionality to the spreadsheet paradigm can be done using the widely-understood idea of copy/paste. Further, we show why the approach requires the presence of a live, visual environment.