Perkedel: Spreadsheet-inspired domain-specific programming language for data entry

Abstract

To develop a data entry application, one may use a general-purpose programming language, a domain-specific programming language for data entry, or end-user tools that offer no programming at all. The first two offer more flexibilities but greatly differ in complexities. General-purpose language is probably overkill for a simple data entry application. In order to be useful, domain-specific language should be as close as possible to the problem domain and still open to research. This paper presents Perkedel, a domain-specific programming language designed for data entry. It is inspired by spreadsheet concept and offers user interface definitions that resemble a paper-based data entry form. Spreadsheet is one of the most popular programming systems that has been around us for almost four decades and we argue that easy user interface definition is important. This results in writing source code for a data entry application that looks nothing like ordinary source code. This speeds up the development time, too. One of our respondents spent only five minutes to a develop a simple data entry application, compared to the fastest development time of 32 minutes using a generalpurpose language, for similar application. That way, we hope that Perkedel may add a little perk to data entry developer's life using this data entry language.