Without a way to view, edit, and share programs, PBD systems will never reach their full potential. We designed and implemented two graphical representation languages for a PBD desktop similar to the Apple Macintosh Finder. Although a user study showed that both languages enabled nonprogrammers to generate and comprehend programs, the study also revealed that the language that more closely reflected the desktop domain doubled users' abilities to accurately generate programs.
Trends suggest that the same language was easier for users to comprehend.
These findings suggest that it is possible for a PBD system to enable nonprogrammers to construct programs and that the form of the representation can impact the PBD system's effectiveness. The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery.