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 Coding: A User's Manual
Live Coding: A User's Manual, published by MIT Press
Exploratory and Live, Programming and Coding: A Literature Study Comparing Perspectives on Liveness
Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of research on this topic exists. Amongst others, this work has been carried out in the communities around three major ideas which incorporate liveness as an important aspect: live programming, exploratory programming, and live coding. While there have been publications on the focus of each particular community, the overall spectrum of liveness across these three communities has not been investigated yet. Thus, we want to delineate the variety of research on liveness. At the same time, we want to investigate overlaps and differences in the values and contributions between the three communities. Therefore, we conducted a literature study with a sample of 212 publications on the terms retrieved from three major indexing services. On this sample, we conducted a thematic analysis regarding the following aspects: motivation for liveness, application domains, intended outcomes of running a system, and types of contributions. We also gathered bibliographic information such as related keywords and prominent publications. Besides other characteristics the results show that the field of exploratory programming is mostly about technical designs and empirical studies on tools for general-purpose programming. In contrast, publications on live coding have the most variety in their motivations and methodologies with a majority being empirical studies with users. As expected, most publications on live coding are applied to performance art. Finally, research on live programming is mostly motivated by making programming more accessible and easier to understand, evaluating their tool designs through empirical studies with users. In delineating the spectrum of work on liveness, we hope to make the individual communities more aware of the work of the others. Further, by giving an overview of the values and methods of the individual communities, we hope to provide researchers new to the field of liveness with an initial overview.
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.
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.
Live Coding with Quint
Live code with Tidal Cycles | Tidal Cycles
Live coding environment for making algorithmic patterns
Substrates conference series - Substrates 2026
An increasing number of researchers see their work as interactive authoring tools or software substrates for interactive computational media. By talking about “authoring tools”, we remove the divide between programmers and users; “software substrates” let us look beyond conventional programming languages and systems; and “interactive computational media” promises a more malleable and adaptable notion of tools for thought we are striving for. This workshop aims to bring together a wide range of perspectives on these matters.
"Design, Composition, and Performance" by Rich Hickey (2013)
"Design, Composition, and Performance" by Rich Hickey (2013)
Experimental live content collections
Live content collections are a new type of content collection that fetch their data at runtime rather than build time. This allows you to access frequently updated data from CMSs, APIs, databases, or other sources using a unified API, without needing to rebuild your site when the data changes.
Live Programming
Spatial programming without escape
An invitation into Droste's Lair
Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic | Retool
Issue 084: Spreadsheets
Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE)
Live Programming in Hostile Territory