Live Programming

An invitation into Droste's Lair

A swords-and-sorcery programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures

Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic | Retool

How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.

Issue 084: Spreadsheets

Welcome to the 84th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Spreadsheets. In this edition, we declare spreadsheets the most popular software programming environment of all time; in the Library section, we learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3 for science reading "Spreadsheet Physics" by Charles Misner and Patrick Cooney; and in our Vidéothèque section, we discover that Excel is a Turing-complete, functional programming language through the eyes of Dr. Felienne Hermans.

Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE)

The 12th Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE 2026) will take place online. LIVE invites submissions of ideas for improving the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming.

Live Programming in Hostile Territory

Live programming research gravitates towards the creation of isolated environments whose success is measured by domination: achieving adoption by displacing rather than integrating with existing tools and practices. To counter this tendency, we advocate that live programming research broaden its purview from the creation of new environments to the augmenting of existing ones and, through a selection of prototypes, explore three adversarial strategies for introducing programmatic capabilities into existing environments which are unfriendly or antagonistic to modification. We discuss how these strategies might promote more pluralistic futures and avoid aggregation into siloed platforms.