The future of programming interactive experience

The Future of Programming Interactive Experience is a multimedia exhibit about future directions in the field of computer programming. Visitors to the exhibit will be able to explore visions resulting from a recent Future of Programming Workshop. They will also be able to contribute their own commentary on these visions, which will become part of the exhibit for subsequent visitors. INTRODUCTION We are not too shy to speculate on future automobiles or homes or even computer hardware. But what about that abstract stuff we call programs—the instructions running behind the scenes that computers and soon cars and houses cannot function without? Future scenario videos such as the Knowledge Navigator [1] and 1995 [4] portray advanced technology but gloss over issues of programming. Our goal in creating the Future of Programming Interactive Experience was to explore the potential of software design directly. Glinert [3] provides us with some tantalizing glimpses into future programming environments. The recent video, Global Desktop 2 [2] begins to speculate on programming, but leaves many questions unanswered. Will advances in computer technology result in new ways for specifying programs such as voice input or hand sketches? Will other aspects of the software development cycle, such as maintenance or documentation, see significant improvements? And how will the nature of the programming community change? Will it expand to include most everyone using computers or will the ranks narrow to include only the technological elite? THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING WORKSHOP To explore these questions we organized the Future of Programming Workshop held in June 1993 in Boulder, Colorado. The workshop brought together some fifty researchers from the United States and Great Britain to discuss their visions of the future. Participants came from variety of backgrounds including software Permlss!on to copy wtthout fee all or part of this material is granted prov,ded that the copses mm not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the pubhcatlon and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permmsion of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee andlor specific permission. CH194 Companmn-4/94 Boston, Massachusetts USA ~ 1994 ACM 0-89791 -651 -4/94 /0049 . ..$3.50 Chris Hurtt Department of Fine Arts University of Colorado at Boulder Boulder, Collorado 80309 E-mail: hurtt @rintintin.colorado. edu engineering, human-computer interaction, visual programming, the business of software, the psychology of programming, and educational computing. The workshop was sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder and US West Advanced Technologies. For two days, workshop participants gathered in small groups to debate various topics related to the future software design. Each group was given the task of developing a visual scenario depicting their ideas for the future. Professional illustrators and video producers were assigned to each group to assist in the scenario development. By the end of the workshop, the groups had assembled a variety of presentations ranging from a ten minute video to a role-playing performance to a series of cartoon sketches. Each scenario was presented to all participants and discussed. Five scenarios were developed. One group focused on software tools to support software development, including applications of agent technology. Two groups used kids as their focal audience. One of these kid scenarios featured the role of networking in facilitating collaboration between kids and working scientists, supported by hypothetical flexible programming tools. The other showed an animated simulation model that could be reprogrammed by students as part of a science project. A fourth scenario explored a mixture of ubiquitous computing ideas, in which computing power is embedded in many places in the environment, and virtual reality as a way of portraying and manipulating the internals of software systems. The fiflh group, nicknamed “Doom and Gloom”, developed a, newscast of the future, in which emerging legal restrictions, growing out of concerns about software reliability and safety, lead to sweeping changes in the role and organization of programming. THE INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE This exhibit allows visitors to explore each of the five scenarios developed at tlhe workshop, together with commentary from the original participants and by us. Further, the presentation software will permit visitors to make their own contributions to the commentary. Visitors can register agreement or disagreement with the ideas presented at the workshop, can add arguments or elaborations, or outline additional scenarios.