End-user development

End-user development (EUD) or end-user programming (EUP) refers to activities and tools that allow end-users – people who are not professional software developers – to program computers. People who are not professional developers can use EUD tools to create or modify software artifacts (descriptions of automated behavior) and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language. In 2005 it was estimated (using statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) that by 2012 there would be more than 55 million end-user developers in the United States, compared with fewer than 3 million professional programmers. Various EUD approaches exist, and it is an active research topic within the field of computer science and human-computer interaction. Examples include natural language programming, spreadsheets, scripting languages (particularly in an office suite or art application), visual programming, trigger-action programming and programming by example. The most popular EUD tool is the spreadsheet. Due to their unrestricted nature, spreadsheets allow relatively un-sophisticated computer users to write programs that represent complex data models, while shielding them from the need to learn lower-level programming languages. Because of their common use in business, spreadsheet skills are among the most beneficial skills for a graduate employee to have, and are therefore the most commonly sought after In the United States of America alone, there are an estimated 13 million end-user developers programming with spreadsheets The programming by example (PbE) approach reduces the need for the user to learn the abstractions of a classic programming language. The user instead introduces some examples of the desired results or operations that should be performed on the data, and the PbE system infers some abstractions corresponding to a program that produces this output, which the user can refine. New data may then be introduced to the automatically created program, and the user can correct any mistakes made by the program in order to improve its definition.