Initially, my thoughts regarding live coding was largely limited to seeing it as a performance where the main “output” of the performance was the music/ visuals resulting from editing the code live.

The reading for this week touches upon certain aspects of live coding that I hadn’t really accounted for. One facet that I found intriguing was related to the style of code that live coders use. Especially since the live demos from last class, I have been noticing stylistic differences in the way people approach live coding – whether it’s the way they have arranged the code, whether they do it from scratch or modify (even within modifications – do they change numbers or function), and comments. This adds a lot to the storytelling aspect of the piece as well, since the live coders build up to a story with modifications and comments – with the code itself and the way it’s written playing a huge part in the performance. This was not something I thought of when I was initially approaching live coding and I largely attributed the performance to just the visuals and the music.

Moreover, looking at live coding in contrast to other performances is also an interesting feature to examine. When looking at live coding, you cannot really perfect every aspect of the performance and there’s some form of abstraction you have to create – where you could perhaps decide on the general “theme” and flow of the code. Whereas with music or dance, you can still achieve some level of precision since improvisation is not really essential. Adding on that, there’s also the general pace of the performance which would be usually higher, and when taking into account both these factors: improvisation and high pace – it adds onto a degree of randomness and spontaneity to the performance, making it very experimental.

Finally, on the subject of comparing coding to live coding – the former works around a lot of established concepts and there’s general practices on how to make the final product more efficient – whether it’s the run time or memory usage. With live coding, since the outcome is more immediate – this aspect is removed and this brings about ideas that are more out-of-the-box and as the reading mentioned, it discourages “overthinking”.