usable live programming (web essay)

[Sean McDirmid]

Hi all,

 

I’ve prepared a short web essay on my usable live programming research:

 

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogramming.aspx

 

Please let me know what you think; I’m trying to gain more experience with web essays with the hope of reaching larger audiences who don’t necessarily read papers.  

 

Thanks,

 

Sean

 

[Jake Brownson]

Hi Sean,

I love to see more content like this online and accessible.

I have a feeling that a significant percentage of the larger audience
that you're hoping to attract to the site will click on the play
buttons and not necessarily read the surrounding text incredibly
carefully. I think it's important to acknowledge that and be able to
communicate the core ideas through the mini-videos enough to intrigue
the reader to read the surrounding text or to at least come away w/
part of the message.

There are a lot of details in the mini-videos which makes it a bit
difficult to understand what's going on. I'm guessing you stare at
these notations quite a lot, but with fresh untrained eyes there's a
lot of noise in the picture. Perhaps with simpler examples that
animate more slowly and with less jerkiness it would be easier to
communicate information more effectively using the mini-videos? I
found the pace of the demo youtube video link at the bottom to be very
nice.

For example:
With the probe videos. Perhaps you could start w/ one that shows "x +
1" and put a probe on "+". The reader would have to spend far less
energy understanding the math on screen and be able to focus on the
thing you're showing.

I also think you could use the examples to build up a story so you can
get away w/ a bit more complexity at the end since the user can
understand it gradually. Maybe the example that builds the circle of
circles would be the end of the story and you could build up to it (or
something like that).

Looks like you're doing some really neat work!

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--
Jake Brownson
Cofounder
Brainium Studios
Skype: jake.brownson
Cell: 503.349.4841

[David Barbour]

I'd like the ability to play the videos in slow motion.

--

[Sean McDirmid]

Hi Jake,

Thanks for the feedback! I don't think I'm yet skilled enough to embed messages completely in videos; this is quite a new format for me that I'm gaining experience with. I understand that some people will just watch videos and not read, and I'm ok right now with missing them. This to me is a compromise between paper and video, and so I just want to see how it works :).

I admit that the language is "weird" and I'm not sure how to take that edge off except to point out that these are real screencasts from my unfinished and very imperfect prototype. I tried talking about what was going on in the language later, but the details are, to be honest, unrelated to the point of the essay (look there is code and things happen!) until we talk about probing and tracing.

Part of the problem is that I'm using animated gifs vs. MPEGs for the core of the essay (the youtube video was something old I had laying around). I wanted to control the presentation like Bret did in his Learnable Programming essay without investing in an Amazon E2 setup! YouTube and Vimeo are incredibly inflexible like this, while the animated gif setup was quite easy if inflexible in other ways.

The second example was not the end, but only the end of the beginning. The punchline of the essay comes after this (that the first two examples demonstrate the glamorous but not useful side of live programming).

Thanks again for the feedback! I'll try to do better with my next essay.