AGENTSHEETS - A MEDIUM FOR CREATING DOMAIN ORIENTED VISUAL LANGUAGES

Visual programming languages strive to simplify the intricate process of programming by capitalizing on innate human perceptual skills. Howe ver, visual representations of general-purpose programming constructs provide little support to end users who need to create programs in spe cific problem domains. Visual languages must be tailored to these dom ains. Creating and maintaining domain-oriented visual programming lang uages requires end users familiar with the domain to collaborate with language designers familiar with the technological possibilities. Comp utational tools are needed to serve as a collaboration medium during t he language design process. Agentsheets is a tool for creating these l anguages. Instead of featuring built-in visualizations of traditional programming constructs, such as sequences, conditionals, and iteration s, Agentsheets endorses an architecture that supports visual language designers in developing domain-oriented languages containing construct s pertinent to end users. It also stimulates an iterative design appro ach by facilitating the incremental modification of the look and behav ior of domain-oriented languages. Finally, it provides role-specific v iews containing specialized tools that support collaboration between e nd users and visual language designers. The authors use their experien ces from a multiyear project in an industrial environment to illustrat e the tools and mechanisms provided by the Agentsheets system and an e xample collaborative design process.