Toward Patterns of Exploratory Programming Practice

Taeumel, Marcel; Rein, Patrick; Hirschfeld, Robert

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-76324-4_7

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The design of object languages plays an essential role in the support for exploratory programming. DSLs capture abstractions tailored to specific domains, and programming environments can offer such high-level abstractions (and others) as widgets [3,55] which can yield better and more powerful explorations [52]. The rendering of the QL form (Figure 1) is an example of such a language-specific widget, with modifications being reified as code [24,66].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Language-Parametric Approach to Exploratory Programming Environments

Binsbergen

Frölich

Merino

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Exploratory programming is a software development style in which code is a medium for prototyping ideas and solutions, and in which even the end-goal can evolve over time. Exploratory programming is valuable in various contexts such as programming education, data science, and end-user programming. However, there is a lack of appropriate tooling and language design principles to support exploratory programming. This paper presents a host language-and object language-independent protocol for exploratory programming akin to the Language Server Protocol. The protocol serves as a basis to develop novel (or extend existing) programming environments for exploratory programming such as computational notebooks and command-line REPLs. An architecture is presented on top of which prototype environments can be developed with relative ease, because existing (language) components can be reused. Our prototypes demonstrate that the proposed protocol is sufficiently expressive to support exploratory programming scenarios as encountered in literature within the software engineering, human-computer interaction and data science domains.

show abstract