CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION OF VISUAL PROGRAMMING-LANGUAGES

Interest in visual programming languages has increased as graphic supp ort in hardware and software has made display and manipulation of visu al images, icons, diagrams and forms reasonable to consider. In this p aper, we present a set of evaluation criteria and associated metrics t o judge visual programming languages. The live criteria, visual nature , functionality, ease of comprehension, paradigm support and scalabili ty, are intended to capture the essence of a general purpose visual pr ogramming language. These criteria are supplemented with a set of subj ective metrics, resulting in an evaluation method that can be used to assess the quality of an individual visual programming language or to compare among elements of a set of such languages. (C) 1997 Academic P ress Limited.