Making programming more conversational

Accelerated by the Do-It-Yourself mindset of the Web 2.0 culture, end-user programming-programming by end users with limited or even no formal programming background-is growing rapidly. Especially in educational settings, children are exposed to computational thinking by making games, building scientific simulations and creating stories. Early educational programming languages such as Logo have made programming substantially more accessible to end-users. More recent approaches include visual programming with a drag-and-drop style of programming that makes it nearly impossible to compose syntactically incorrect programs. However, as the syntactic challenges of end-user programming are gradually fading into the past, the new frontier of semantic programming support emerges. This demonstration introduces Conversational Programming, a system to make programming more conversational. A conversational programming agent runs programs one step into the future in order to help end-users visualize discrepancies between the programs they intended to write and their actual programming results.