I’m very excited to see a paper like this! I’m still digesting it but I’ve been waiting to see something like this for a long time.

My paper on live programming would be related to some degree (“Living it up with a Live Programming Language” OOPSLA 2007, Onward). We dealt with time in two ways: by continuously re-evaluating the program, and by abstracting over time deltas. However, unlike the other projects that you’ve mentioned, my work is more aimed at the OO PL community rather than the arts community.

I agree that it would have been useful to make these three classes of time explicit, and discussed the relationships between them more. Also good point that I’ve neglected to note the contribution of chuck/impromptu/supercollider to time semantics. I’ll address these points as I integrate this with my thesis and (hopefully) publish it as a chapter elsewhere.

cheers

I might make some suggestions about the discussion on Time in section 6. I agree that there is some perceptual distortion of time during tasks which occurs during programming, but I’m not sure the charracterisation of it as algorithm time is the best way to put it. It seems that there are three, rather than two as suggested in the paper, classes of time that are relevant here. Real (clock) time, perceptual (thinking) time, and execution (computation) time. The latter being the time it takes to execute the code – this is perhaps ‘algorithm’ time. This is alluded to in the discussion on dynamic programming. Interaction and management of these three speeds of operation is one of the major performative challenges of live coding.

In relation to dealing with time in programming languages, there is indeed an oversight in this area in most languages as you point out. However, I think you could acknowledge more fully the contribution here of live coding languages such as Chuck and Impromptu (probably others) that have added language constructs that more directly manage the time-based elements of computation with a particular view toward enabling creativity with time-based media through code.

At some point we had to tell of our progress to the customer – an artists duo – and we kept saying “at this moment I analyse video and send the result to Carlo and he compares the frame to the templates from the database…” until at some point the artist said: “but you will make the computer do all that, right?” “oops – said us – when I say I, I really mean computer…. and when I say Carlo I mean computer too… we’ve coded ourselves in”.

It was extra confusing because part of the system WAS manual and only we two knew, when “Carlo” actually meant the person and when the computer.

I guess having myself inside the computer is my favorite metaphor.