PPIG 2016 - 27th Annual Workshop
Software and How it Lives On - Embedding Live Programs in the World Around Them
Antranig Basman, Luke Church, Clemens Klokmose, Colin Clark
Abstract: Virtues beyond those that traditionally motivate live programming are needed to support lively and unbounded communities of authors collaborating by creating and using shared artefacts. We will argue for the importance of each element of an artefact’s design to be externalizable, and introduce terms describing the function of parts of a fully capable live externalizable system (the res potentia and res extensa). We critique the standard presentation of live programming, situating it within a wider set of authorial values. We introduce the quantity of divergence of a programming language or system and explain the desirability of minimising it. We survey some existing systems through this taxonomy and speculate how future systems could improve on them.