It's Alive! (TouchDevelop)

2012-2013

PLDI '13

Keywords: Live, IDE

~~The live programming feature proposed in the paper is already shipped with the curent version of TouchDevelop. Test it in your web browser!~~

Unfortunately, Microsoft retired the TouchDevelop platform in June 2019. Its live programming techniques have been adopted by subsequent projects such as Microsoft MakeCode and have impacted programming experience design of various projects such as TextAlive.

Live programming allows programmers to edit the code of a running program and immediately see the effect of the code changes. This tightening of the traditional edit-compile-run cycle reduces the cognitive gap between program code and behavior, improving the learning experience of beginning programmers while boosting the productivity of seasoned ones. Unfortunately, live programming is difficult to realize in practice as imperative languages lack well-defined abstraction boundaries that make live programming responsive or its feedback comprehensible.

This paper enables live programming for user interface programming by cleanly separating the rendering and non-rendering aspects of a UI program, allowing the display to be refreshed on a code change without restarting the program. A type and effect system formalizes this separation and provides an evaluation model that incorporates the code update step. By putting live programming on a more formal footing, we hope to enable critical and technical discussion of live programming systems.

This work was done during my internship at Microsoft Research Redmond TouchDevelop team of RiSE Group.

YouTube

Cite this!2013PLDI '13

Sebastian Burckhardt, Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux, Sean McDirmid, Michal Moskal, Nikolai Tillmann, Jun Kato

Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp.95-104

Paper PDF Slides PDF Resolve DOI

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{pldi2013-kato-alive,
  title = {It's Alive! Continuous Feedback in UI Programming},
  author = {Burckhardt, Sebastian and Fahndrich, Manuel and de Halleux, Peli and McDirmid, Sean and Moskal, Michal and Tillmann, Nikolai and Kato, Jun},
  year = {2013},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation},
  location = {Seattle, Washington, USA},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  series = {PLDI '13},
  pages = {95--104},
  doi = {10.1145/2491956.2462170},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-2014-6},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2491956.2462170},
  numpages = {10},
  acmid = {2462170},
  keywords = {graphical user interface, live programming},
  projectsite = {https://junkato.jp/touchdevelop},
  pdf = {http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=189242},
  slides = {http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=189242},
  project = {touchdevelop}
}

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It's Alive! (TouchDevelop)
Continuous Feedback in UI Programming

Abstract

Presentation materials

PLDI 2013 Demo Video

Experimental UI

Publications

It's Alive! Continuous Feedback in UI Programming

It's Alive! (TouchDevelop)Continuous Feedback in UI Programming