The visual language research community does not have a single, universally agreed-upon definition of exactly what a visual language is. This is surprising since the field of visual languages has been a vibrant research area for over three decades now. Disagreement about fundamental definitions can undermine a field, fragment the research community, and potentially harm the research progress. To address this issue we have analyzed two decades of VL/HCC publications to clarify the concept of visual language as accepted by the VL/HCC community, effectively adopting the approach of descriptive linguistics. As a result we have obtained a succinct visual language ontology, which captures the essential aspects of visual languages and which can be used to characterize individual languages through visual language profiles. These profiles can tell whether and in what sense a notation can be considered a visual language. We also report trends from and statistics about the field of visual languages.

/pdf/what-is-a-visual-language-57gxdp9lkl.pdf

What is a visual language

Never before has it been easier to make powerful, computationally enhanced tools for creative expression and technical innovation available to the masses. We set out to investigate the ways in which a system designed to promote rapid electronics design and prototyping could enable people of diverse technical and social backgrounds to explore powerful ideas through meaningful, hands-on design experiences. When the tools themselves are transparent and easily extensible by anyone, a strong user community naturally begins to develop. Users are encouraged to dig deeper into the layers of complexity that they encounter while following the learning trajectories we have carefully built into the system itself. This thesis focuses on the design, development, and deployment of the Tower system, a powerful, flexible, and extensible electronics design environment, as well as the exploration of its applications in the fields of development, education, and industrial prototyping. Thesis Supervisor: Bakhtiar J. Mikhak Title: Research Scientist, MIT Media Laboratory

Encouraging innovation by engineering the learning curve

Collaborative and multiple-notation programming environments for children

Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of research on this topic exists. Amongst others, this work has been carried out in the communities around three major ideas which incorporate liveness as an important aspect: live programming, exploratory programming, and live coding. While there have been publications on the focus of each particular community, the overall spectrum of liveness across these three communities has not been investigated yet. Thus, we want to delineate the variety of research on liveness. At the same time, we want to investigate overlaps and differences in the values and contributions between the three communities. 
Therefore, we conducted a literature study with a sample of 212 publications on the terms retrieved from three major indexing services. On this sample, we conducted a thematic analysis regarding the following aspects: motivation for liveness, application domains, intended outcomes of running a system, and types of contributions. We also gathered bibliographic information such as related keywords and prominent publications. 
Besides other characteristics the results show that the field of exploratory programming is mostly about technical designs and empirical studies on tools for general-purpose programming. In contrast, publications on live coding have the most variety in their motivations and methodologies with a majority being empirical studies with users. As expected, most publications on live coding are applied to performance art. Finally, research on live programming is mostly motivated by making programming more accessible and easier to understand, evaluating their tool designs through empirical studies with users. 
In delineating the spectrum of work on liveness, we hope to make the individual communities more aware of the work of the others. Further, by giving an overview of the values and methods of the individual communities, we hope to provide researchers new to the field of liveness with an initial overview.

Exploratory and Live, Programming and Coding: A Literature Study Comparing Perspectives on Liveness

Though notoriously difficult, real-time programming offers children a rich new set of applications, and the opportunity to engage bodily knowledge and experience more centrally in intellectual enterprises. Moreover, the seemingly specialized problems of real-time programming can be seen as keys to longstanding difficulties of programming in general. 
I report on a critical design inquiry, into the nature and potential of real-time programming by children. A cyclical process of design, prototyping and testing of computational environments has led to two design innovations: (1) a language in which declarative and procedural descriptions of computation are given equal status, and can subsume each other to arbitrary levels of nesting. (2) a “live text” environment, in which real-time display of, and intervention in, program execution are accomplished within the program text itself. 
Based on children's use of these tools, as well as comparative evidence from other media and domains, I argue that the coordination of discrete and continuous process should be considered a central Big Idea in programming and beyond. In addition, I offer the theoretical notion of the “steady frame” as a way to clarify the user interface requirements of real-time programming, and also to understand the role of programming in learning to construct dynamic models, theories, and representations. Implications for the role of programming in education and for the future of computational literacy are discussed. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)

https://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/archive/ch-phd.pdf

Real-time programming and the big ideas of computational literacy

Dijkstra argued (1968) that the structure of programs should match that of their execution. This challenge is important but difficult for the kinds of fluid multiprocess programming required by even simple robotics problems. Among recognized paradigms applied to robotics, some express process structure more directly than others, but none easily encompasses the full range of process and control relationships needed to describe interesting behavior simply. The approach described here, structured concurrent programming, adopts a diverse set of process structures as primary language elements with three consequences: (i) explicit process management via process ID's is not used: (ii) previously disjoint programming paradigms are integrated more tightly, than before: (iii) it becomes more feasible for textual programs to execute "in place" in a live programming environment.

Toward a unified paradigm for constructing and understanding robot processes

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Toward a unified paradigm for constructing and understanding robot processes