HANDS and Programming :: Programming Technology Engineering Essays

HANDS and Programming Humans were never meant to stare days at a time into a screen and type lines of code into a vast expanse of nothingness. Our minds reject such alien methods with surprising ferocity. It is for this reason that programming has taken a more human-centric approach. Programming is adverse to what humans are naturally inclined to do, and because of this a push has been made for a development of programming where the programmer is not doing that which is against his nature. An example of this is HANDS, which is a programming language that is primarily directed towards children, but incorporates the human-centric ideas. (Myers, Pane, Miller) HANDS bases its programming platform on objects, in HANDS there is a figure sitting at a table that can manipulate a stack of cards, the cards being the programming utilities. This approach lessens the tedious editing of line after line of mundane code. In all actuality the programming is more of a game than a task. This appeals to children greatly (of which the language was geared for), but the basic concept could also be applied to the average programmer. The ability to program without using dry code will be a great step forward in human-centric computing. Once the base level of the computer has been conformed to serve the human’s needs, the other parts of computing that base themselves off of programming will be changed as well. It is only a matter of time. (Myers, Pane, Miller) Another type of progressive programming is in the field of Mechanical Engineering. For fifteen years â€Å"Sammie†--which is a computer model of a human--has been incorporating itself into the workplace. Sammie was a vast improvement for the engineers and their approach to the solving of problems. The engineers at one time had to interpret the anthropometric tables themselves, but with Sammie, the work was done for them allowing quicker, more accurate work to be accomplished. This is a type of program that allowed humans to operate their computers in a way that was much more natural to them, which in itself is a major progression from the previous methods that were sadly outdated and used too often. (Morrissey) Michael L. Dertouzos, the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science wrote The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us.