Published In The Past, Present and Future of Programming in HCI

The first computer users were all programmers, and the field of Human-Computer Interaction started, in part, with a focus on improving how programming was done. There was a signifi-cant amount of work in the 1980’s on this topic, but it mostly died out in the 1990s. Now, there is a resurgence of work on what used to be called the Psychology of Programming, Soft-ware Psychology, and the Empirical Studies of Programming. Now, research that combines HCI and software engineering concerns regularly wins awards at both the software engineer-ing and HCI conferences, and although there is no longer a conference devoted solely to this topic, it is a major focus of the popular VL/HCC conference series. In this paper, we argue that new HCI and software engineering methods and tools, along with a new acceptance of the programming community, makes it a propitious time for a renewed focus on this topic. One way to define “programming ” is as the process of trans-forming a mental plan of desired actions for a computer into a representation that can be understood by the computer [10] Expressed this way, it seems obvious that the study of humans and programming should be a topic of HCI. Indeed, this area of study has a long history, and has many names, including th