Conversational programming in action

Accelerated by the Do-It-Yourself mindset of the Web 2.0 culture, end-user programming, which is programming by end users with limited, if any, formal programming background, is growing rapidly. Especially in educational settings, children are exposed to computational thinking by making games, building scientific simulations and creating stories. Early educational programming languages such as Logo have made programming substantially more accessible to end users. More recent approaches include visual programming with drag-and-drop style of programming making it nearly impossible to compose syntactically incorrect programs. However, as the syntactic challenges of end-user programming are gradually fading into the past, the new frontier of semantic programming support emerges. This demonstration introduces Future Trace, a system to make programming more conversational. A conversational programming agent runs programs one step into the future in order to visualize discrepancies between the programs users intended to write and the actual programs.