Native End-User Languages: A Design Framework

In the evolving information-rich society, there are compelling reasons (e.g., educational, social, cultural etc.) to support global, native end-users to learn programming and computing skills. Current computer languages and computing environments pose conceptual, logical, semantic and syntactic challenges to native end-users, especially those who lack English knowledge and are new to programming. This paper identifies the native end-users’ usability issues of programming languages and proposes a novel nativeization paradigm (NP), in which, the native end-users can command, operate, interact and program in their natural, information structures. This research describes a design framework and rationale of a simple, experimental, computer programming language based on nativeization. This paradigm will be embodied in EQUAL, a system for design, implementation and evaluation of native end-user programming languages and computing environment in a few representative native end-user languages such as German, Cyrillic, Italian and CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean).