Paul Methfessel
Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam, Germany
Programmers regularly explore the execution of code examples to verify assumptions by adding print statements or commenting in and out setup code in their implementation to isolate code paths of interest. In our formative study on developing embedded programs, where proximity to hardware dictates low abstraction levels, we observed that wrong assumptions occur frequently. However, traditional editors for embedded programs lack support for such explorations. Consequently, programmers have to re-create and clean up setup and print statements in their code for each example. MµSE supports isolated explorations of code examples by promoting examples to first-class entities that allow for the mocking of side effects from code and hardware, which could interfere with examples, and automatically showing values of expressions, replacing print statements for debugging. Our exploratory study found that MµSE supports participants in developing an understanding of software and hardware components and identifying false assumptions from observation of incorrect behavior.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642186
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