In September, an international seminar on Live Coding will take place at Schloss-Dagstuhl, an institution known for a continual, peer-reviewed programme of research events in Computer Science. The seminars have purposefully loose structures, with focus on bringing leading thinkers together to define the future of a field, rather than presenting past results. We already have a diverse range of participants with more still to be confirmed, and expect to develop live coding into a theme which cuts across arts practice, computing education, software engineering and the psychology of programming, bringing together the philosophy of both arts and computer science.
Here is the motivational text for the event:
Live coding celebrates creative experiences of technology, and empowers creative technology users. We want to see programming languages and tools that not only express and create software more effectively, but draw in the public: students, audiences and digital citizens.
This Dagstuhl seminar brings together the researchers creating new generations of interactive software development tools. Our goal is to make users into hackers, and engineers into artists. Too many programming languages are created for the office, laboratory or battlefield, but live coding is about the experience of making software as a part of human life. The technical challenges are to take interaction seriously, maintain flow alongside rigour, encourage agility, and engage with social communities.
The seminar focus is on sharing and developing technical expertise, but we’re also going to explore beyond bounds of conventional software engineering or arts categories. Participants will include not only leading programming language designers and software engineers, but psychologists, philosophers, educators and of course a slew of the world’s top live coding performers.
The concrete output from the seminar will be a manifesto and reference work for the rapidly expanding live coding community. We hope to integrate video tutorials with a book from a major publishing brand, to reach both researchers and professional enthusiasts.
Live coding is rapidly changing the way the world thinks about software engineering. We believe that it can also transform computer science education and uses of technology. The hacker and maker movements need these kind of tools. And computing must be inspiring if it’s going to be educational. This seminar will do important work. It’s going to be practical work. And it will probably be hard work. But the last thing it will be is boring. We’re going to be hacking, learning and jamming. We promise an unconventional programme, a lot of fun, and the joy of the Dagstuhl experience – community, focus, and inspiring surroundings.
