Live Programming in Hostile Territory

Live programming research gravitates towards the creation of isolated environments whose success is measured by domination: achieving adoption by displacing rather than integrating with existing tools and practices. To counter this tendency, we advocate that live programming research broaden its purview from the creation of new environments to the augmenting of existing ones and, through a selection of prototypes, explore three adversarial strategies for introducing programmatic capabilities into existing environments which are unfriendly or antagonistic to modification. We discuss how these strategies might promote more pluralistic futures and avoid aggregation into siloed platforms.