CS263: Design of Programming Languages

Visual Programming Languages: A Survey

Note: This survey was originally written as a term project paper for the graduate course on programming language design in December 1997. As was required by the course instructor, we uploaded the report to a web page, received our grades, and forgot all about it. To our great surprise, others have found this paper through various Internet search engines and started referring to it. In December 2004 we decided to submit this paper as an official technical report to make it easier for others to locate and cite. Despite this more official status, please keep in mind that this survey was written in 1997 and was never meant to be more than a term project paper. While we tried our best to write a survey representing the state of the art in visual programming language research, we make no claim that we actually succeeded.

Marat Boshernitsan and Michael Downes. Visual Programming Languages: A Survey. Technical Report CSD-04-1368, University of California, Berkeley, December 1997. [PDF]

Original survey paper: Visual Programming Languages: A Survey [ PostScript | PDF ]

Origianl presentation slides: Visual Programming Languages: A Survey [ PowerPoint | HTML ]