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Usable live programming

Published: 29 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Programming today involves code editing mixed with bouts of debugging to get feedback on code execution. For programming to be more fluid, editing and debugging should occur concurrently as live programming. This paper describes how live execution feedback can be woven into the editor by making places in program execution, not just code, navigable so that evaluation results can be probed directly within the code editor. A pane aside the editor also traces execution with entries that are similarly navigable, enabling quick problem diagnosis. Both probes and traces are refreshed continuously during editing, and are easily configured based on debugging needs. We demonstrate the usefulness of this live programming experience with a prototype.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Onward! 2013: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software
October 2013
218 pages
ISBN:9781450324724
DOI:10.1145/2509578
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 October 2013

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  1. debugging
  2. live programming

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Onward! 2013 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 27 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 40 of 105 submissions, 38%

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