Introducing Circa: A dataflow-based language for live coding

In a live programming environment, the state of the running program is available during the editing process. An ideal live programming system should be able to harness the live program to offer improved abilities for code creation and manipulation. We introduce Circa, a language and platform designed to address this need. We argue in favor of a dataflow-based model of computation, and we show how this format enables useful methods of code inspection and manipulation. We present a framework based on the backpropogation algorithm that allows the user to manipulate their program by expressing a desire against the program's result. We discuss how these code editing abilities can combine to produce a highly effective environment.