Abstract
Most modern applications are immutable and turn-key despite the acknowledged benefits of empowering users to modify their software. Writing extensible software remains challenging, even for expert programmers. Reprogramming or extending existing software is often laborious or wholly blocked, requiring sophisticated knowledge of application architecture or setting up a development environment. We present Varv, a programming model representing reprogrammable interactive software as a declarative data structure. Varv defines interactive applications as a set of concepts that consist of a schema and actions. Applications in Varv support incremental modification, allowing users to reprogram through addition and selectively suppress, modify, or add behavior. Users can define high-level concepts, creating an abstraction layer and effectively a domain-specific language for their application domain, emphasizing reuse and modification. We demonstrate the reprogramming and collaboration capabilities of Varv in two case studies and illustrate how the event engine allows for extensive tooling support.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | CHI '22 : Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Place of publication | New York |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Publication date | Apr 2022 |
| Article number | 492 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450391573 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2022 |
| Event | CHI '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - New Orleans , United States Duration: 29 Apr 2022 → 5 May 2022 |
Conference
| Conference | CHI '22 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | New Orleans |
| Period | 29/04/2022 → 05/05/2022 |
Keywords
- declarative programming
- reprogramming
- interactive software
- liveness
- real-time collaboration