Live end-user programming

How will live programming get from our current aspirational demos to use in the real world? Modern professional programming will not change easily: our technology stack is a vast edifice built up over decades to optimize performance and compatibility, not ease of use. It is unlikely we can retrofit live programming into this edifice without substantial redesign and reengineering, which would face immense technical, economic, and cultural challenges. The one way forward we see is to retrace the steps of the original live programming environment: spreadsheets. Spreadsheets help non-programmers solve small-scale problems. If we do likewise, we can offer a fully live and radically simplified programming experience that is actually useful in practice, albeit to non-programmers. Perhaps that could be a launching pad to subsequently address professional programming. As a case in point we demonstrate the Chorus project (previously named Transcript), which focuses on do-it-yourself mobile social apps. By restricting ourselves to small problems and non-professional programmers we can provide a highly integrated programming experience that for the first time incorporates live database programming. We demonstrate our initial progress in order to spark a discussion in the live-programming community about the tradeoffs of researching professional vs. end-user programming.