I’m extremely new to live coding in the sense that When I ask people how long they’ve been live coding, they often say something to me like “oh no not very long at all, I’m very new to it” and then they state a number of months over five times longer than mine.
So I was surprised when the conference organisers reached out to me, asking me to do one of the keynotes. I said yes of course! What a huge privilege and opportunity. Of course I’d do it.
But uhh I guessed that they wanted me to come and talk about something I’ve got a tiny bit of experience in? Like open practice or emotional blockers or something like that / that I had spoken about before? So I asked them if that was what they had / had in mind.
But no Well yes They said I could talk about anything I wanted to talk about, but it would be great if I could talk about “liveness”, this year’s theme.
Alright then!
In the back-and-forth with the organisers, Bernat told me “everything you do is live”. So the liveness theme should be a good fit, right?
And At the time I had to take a step back and ask myself “wait a second, is that true?”
Is everything I do “live”?
In the past, I have actually been quite critical of “liveness” as a goal or thing to be valued. In my talk about my tool arroost, I highlighted how it sometimes doesn’t respond in a live way. I also continually critique the canonical Dead Fish talk, which some believe to be the verbal bible of live programming: In various places.
I’ve always found “liveness” to be an unsatisfying, hollow, empty, cold concept. I associate it with the future of coding crowd trying to reinvent computing to be their idea of beautiful or pure or something and never quite getting anywhere and never quite getting anyone else involved other than themselves. There’s a purism to it that I hate. I see it as non-humanist. The focus is on creating something that “feels powerful” or “feels right” to them rather than something that helps people or brings people together.
Some people see these things as the same thing and I say that that says a lot about some people.
Every time I write or say some criticism of the future of coding crowd, some people get upset, and Good! Let it upset you! I hope it rocks the boat a bit in that man-dominated, VC-littered, america-focused, idol-obsessed world.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH
So… I tried to figure out what the hell I was doing.
What do I actually think of “liveness”? Do I really always do it? Why did Bernat say that?!?
And yeah it turns out that I— After some sitting down and thinking and tooting, I realised: Yes, I think I now do / do everything live. How did that happen????? How did it come to this????????
Addition by Bernat:
Sorry I made you question your ideas about liveness 😂
it was really an innocent comment. I’ve always done live stuff, not as a technologically pure philosophy but as what’s natural to me. It feels natural to see a system react instantly to what I do. It feels more like I’m playing, instead of working, if that makes sense. Since I was a kid and programmed in Basic or Logo this was the way things worked for me. Of course that all dissolved in university where I learned “the real industry”, but when I graduated and started working with Smalltalk and Scratch, and especially working somewhere where I was constantly surrounded by kids learning how to program, I remembered what it was that got me excited about live systems. Liveness is really to me a pedagogical prerequisite. You can learn with non-live systems, but you’ve got to be -as opposed to what you say in your post- an analytical engineer-like most probably male archetype person to learn that way.
What do you think, reader?
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