Using PL Theory to Make People Happier
summary
Argues that treating interfaces as languages yields concrete fixes: an accidental JSON command language is boxed away into a single interpreter, stripped of recursion and guarded by schema checking to eliminate a privilege‑escalation exploit; a client‑side geospatial UI becomes a tiny typed DSL with a simple type system and only nonrecursive selection operations so queries evaluate quickly in JavaScript. Presents design steps, concrete edits, and a working prototype UI model.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 3:51adding a button to an interface
- 8:50applying these techniques to interfaces
- 15:49design from scratch a graphical user interface
- 24:28present our syntax as a tree
- 27:48add extra filter queries
- 31:17create a formal model of the semantics
- 34:44drawing a graph of the relationships between user interface components
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