A visual programming environment for Smalltalk

Abstract

Learning object-oriented programming, especially Smalltalk, poses the double problem of learning a programming environment and learning a design methodology. The visual programming style is well adapted to object-oriented paradigm to better interact with the objects and to better understand links between the entities. That is why we propose an experimental visual programming environment which makes Smalltalk programming more accessible to novices. This study takes place in a larger project which aims at providing a small company with a visual programming environment based on a Theatre metaphor. In this paper we focus mostly on the visual language aspect. Our visual language is a close mapping of Smalltalk. Message sending is represented by a box, and the linking between messages is defined by a spatial organization of the boxes. Since the visual interaction with objects leads us to work with class instances, the class concept is partly hidden and objects are created by cloning directly. >