PX/17

Programming Experience 2017 (PX/17) Workshop

April 4 (Tue), 2017

Co-located with <Programming> 2017 at VUB in Brussels, Belgium

Flyer (PDF) | 2017.programming-conference.org/track/px-2017 | programming-experience.org/px17

Contributions

Proceedings are available from ACM DL at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3079368.

Abstract

Imagine a software development task: some sort of requirements and specification including performance goals and perhaps a platform and programming language. A group of developers head into a vast workroom. In that room they discover they need to explore the domain and the nature of potential solutions—they need exploratory programming.

The Programming Experience (PX) Workshop is about what happens in that room when one or a couple of programmers sit down in front of computers and produce code, especially when it's exploratory programming. Do they create text that is transformed into running behavior (the old way), or do they operate on behavior directly ("liveness"); are they exploring the live domain to understand the true nature of the requirements; are they like authors creating new worlds; does visualization matter; is the experience immediate, immersive, vivid and continuous; do fluency, literacy, and learning matter; do they build tools, meta-tools; are they creating languages to express new concepts quickly and easily; and curiously, is joy relevant to the experience?

Correctness, performance, standard tools, foundations, and text-as-program are important traditional research areas, but the experience of programming and how to improve and evolve it are the focus of this workshop, and in this edition we would like to focus on exploratory programming.

Submissions

Submissions are solicited for Programming Experience 2017 (PX/17). The thrust of the workshop is to explore the human experience of programming—what it feels like to program, or more accurately, what it should feel like. The technical topics include exploratory programming, live programming, authoring, representation of active content, visualization, navigation, modularity mechanisms, immediacy, literacy, fluency, learning, tool building, and language engineering.

Submissions by academics, professional programmers, and non-professional programmer are welcome. Submissions can be in any form and format, including but not limited to papers, presentations, demos, videos, panels, debates, essays, writers' workshops, and art. Presentation slots will be between 30 minutes and one hour, depending on quality, form, and relevance to the workshop. Submissions directed toward publication should be so marked, and the program committee will engage in peer review for all such papers. Video publication will be arranged.

All artifacts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Papers and essays must be written in English, provided as PDF documents, and follow the new ACM Master Article Template with the sigconf option.

There is no page limit on submitted papers and essays. It is, however, the responsibility of the authors to keep the reviewers interested and motivated to read the paper. Reviewers are under no obligation to read all or even a substantial portion of a paper or essay if they do not find the initial part of it interesting.

Review

Papers and essays labeled as publications will undergo standard peer review; other submissions will be reviewed for relevance and quality; shepherding will be available.

Important dates

Publication

Papers and essays accepted through peer review will be published as part of ACM's Digital Library; video publication on Vimeo or other streaming site; other publication on the PX workshop website.

Workshop format

Paper presentations, presentations without papers, live demonstrations, performances, videos, panel discussions, debates, writers' workshops, art galleries, dramatic readings.

We will be following a variant of the writers' workshop format used in the software patterns community. This format works well when the goals include improving the form or presentation of the ideas as well as improving or understanding the ideas themselves.

In the writers' workshop:

This is the basic format, but we adjust the flow according to the needs of the group and the way the discussion is going. It is formal to ensure all the important points are covered.

For more information about the workshop format, please have a look at Richard P. Gabriel's book "Writers' Workshops & the World of Making Things" (at dreamsongs.com, local copy).

Organizers

Program committee

PX editions