Toward A More Scalable End-User Scripting Language

End-user scripting languages are relatively easy to learn, but have limited expressive power. Tile-based scripting systems are particularly accessible to beginners, but usu-ally are very limited in scope and usually lack extensibility, and for some tasks the tile idiom becomes cumbersome. Conventional programming languages used by computer professionals are far more powerful, but at the cost of additional complexity and limited environmental support, which place them out of the casual programmer’s reach. This paper presents TileScript, an attempt to combine the accessibility of a tile-based programming interface with the leverage of a full textual programming language and with a simple means of extension, making it potentially an ap-pealing tool for the novice programmer without sacrificing any expressiveness. All TileScript programs, whether built originally with tiles or textually, can always be edited both graphically via a drag-and-drop tile interface and textually, and the user can freely switch back and forth between tile and textual representations at any time. Additionally, TileScript’s simple yet powerful extensibility mechanisms allow the language to be used to tackle problems that would normally be out of the scope of an end-user scripting language. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0639876. Any opinions, findings, and con-clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. 1