PL and HCI: Better Together

There is a rising tide of research and corresponding industrial impact at the intersection of Programming Languages (PL) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Data journalists are wielding new programming tools to enrich many major media outlets with interactive visualizations. Microsoft Excel, the primary data programming environment for hundreds of millions of people, now comes with a program synthesis tool that helps users clean and transform their data, sparing them from writing painful spreadsheet formulas. These projects share an important common factor: they succeed because they make programming easier. They demonstrate the power of combining human-computer interaction (HCI) and programming languages (PL). In this talk we will discuss key directions that HCI and PL experts should explore to take full advantage of the combined power of HCI and PL. Specifically, interface designers should give users programming languages (PLs) but help them use those PLs responsibly and not to expect code on its own, and language designers should pick problems motivated by user research, leverage existing theories of human capabilities and behavior, and get frequent user feedback.

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