PWCT: a novel general-purpose visual programming language in support of pervasive application development
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PWCT: a novel general‑purpose visual programming language in support of pervasive application development Mahmoud S. Fayed1 · Muhammad Al‑Qurishi1 · Atif Alamri1 · M. Anwar Hossain1 · Ahmad A. Al‑Daraiseh1 Received: 30 May 2020 / Accepted: 25 July 2020 © China Computer Federation (CCF) 2020
Abstract Visual programming languages (VPLs) are inevitable tools to attract more people to the programming world. In this article, a novel VPL—programming without coding technology (PWCT)—is introduced. The main objective behind developing this tool was to create a general-purpose VPL that also possesses textual languages’ capabilities. PWCT is a language that can be used to develop similar programs to the ones developed in C++ or Java for example. As the name indicates, PWCT requires no coding at all. A person only needs to know the basic programming concepts to be able to use the tool. PWCT has many attractive features and can be used to develop applications of different domain including pervasive computing. PWCT has been launched as a Sourceforge project, which currently has more than 240 K downloads for the tool and over 22 M downloads for the samples and tutorials. A staggering number of programs were developed in PWCT all over the world. This article focuses on the core aspect of the tool. In addition, a number of studies are carried out to evaluate the usability and productivity of the tool. Feedback from developers and results from the studies indicate that PWCT is a very appealing, competitive, and powerful language that can be used in developing pervasive and mobile computing applications. Keywords Visual programming languages · General-purpose · Programming · No coding · Pervasive computing
1 Introduction VPL is a programming language that uses visual representations such as graphics, drawings, animations, images, or icons instead of text to develop programs. One of the main motivations to develop VPLs is the fact that learning textual Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-020-00038-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * M. Anwar Hossain [email protected] Mahmoud S. Fayed [email protected] Muhammad Al‑Qurishi [email protected] Atif Alamri [email protected] Ahmad A. Al‑Daraiseh [email protected] 1
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
programming languages (TPLs) has proven to be difficult for many people. Another motivation is that, many people remember things and think in terms of pictures (Boshernitsan and Downes 2014). Since the sixties of the last century, tens of different VPLs were created. Using a VPL, even a novice programmer can develop useful programs without the need to study TPLs. VPLs have many advantages such as fewer programming concepts, concreteness, explicit depiction of relationships, immediate visual feedback and many others (Maragaret 1999). Most of the successful VPLs are domain-specific languages. For example,
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