Addressing misconceptions about code with always-on programming visualizations
Name
Miller_Addressing misconceptions.pdf
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472.78 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Lieber, Tom
Brandt, Joel
Miller, Robert C.
Date Issued
April 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Tom Lieber, Joel R. Brandt, and Rob C. Miller. 2014. Addressing misconceptions about code with always-on programming visualizations. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2481-2490.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We present Theseus, an IDE extension that visualizes run-time behavior within a JavaScript code editor. By displaying real-time information about how code actually behaves during execution, Theseus proactively addresses misconceptions by drawing attention to similarities and differences between the programmer's idea of what code does and what it actually does. To understand how programmers would respond to this kind of an always-on visualization, we ran a lab study with graduate students, and interviewed 9 professional programmers who were asked to use Theseus in their day-to-day work. We found that users quickly adopted strategies that are unique to always-on, real-time visualizations, and used the additional information to guide their navigation through their code.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557409
