The Road to Live Programming: Insights from the Practice

Live Programming environments allow programmers to get feedback instantly while changing software. Liveness is gaining attention among industrial and open-source communities; several IDEs offer high degrees of liveness. While several studies looked at how programmers work during software evolution tasks, none of them consider live environments. We conduct such a study based on an analysis of 17 programming sessions of practitioners using Pharo, a mature Live Programming environment. The study is complemented by a survey and subsequent analysis of 16 programming sessions in additional languages, e.g., JavaScript. We document the approaches taken by developers during their work. We find that some liveness features are extensively used, and have an impact on the way developers navigate source code and objects in their work.