Turning Source Code into a Design Material

Computer programming is a highly creative and explorative process. In spite of this, current programming tools provide significantly better support for well defined situations than for exploration. This makes programming unnecessarily difficult. This MSc thesis investigates how design professions use hands-on learning, materials and visual cognition to support creative problem solving. A cognitive model of programming as reflective practice is proposed. Combined with field studies of working programmers, a number of characteristics for programming tools supporting this model are proposed. This includes the ability to interact directly with fragments of code and gain immediate feedback; the ability to express concepts visually; and the ability to devise new representations quickly for new problems as they are encountered. A design is developed and a technical proof-of-concept prototype implemented as an HTML5 based web application. The design is critiqued by evaluating a number of problem scenarios identified in the user studies and the implementation process of the prototype against the solutions proposed by the design. It is concluded that the proposed model of programming as reflective practice, and the proposed design, have the potential to simplify programming significantly. It is suggested that future work implements key features of the design and conducts formal usability tests in order to quantify the contribution that programming as reflective practice can make to programming tools.