Something I’ve noted between this reading and the past few readings on the ‘liveness’ of live coding is that many of us does not really have a choice in how we approach our performances yet. The ideal ‘live’ coding as presented by the author is a spectrum of options — those that create everything from scratch in their performances, those that ‘pre-gram’ some parts of the performance and those that simply reorganize functions.

I think that even in our drum circle sessions, it is clear that it is difficult to start from scratch/ only pre-gram some parts, and most of us have thus far preferred to pre-gram and rehearse the performance. It is thus more of a ‘coding performance’ than a ‘live coding performance’. I am not saying this is a bad thing — as the differences are indistinguishable for the untrained eye ( probably only the professor could tell if someone was done ad-hoc or if it was pre-planned simply by looking at it ), but simply a reflection of the experience we have with the live coding environments thus far. It might be possible for us as students to approach the ‘from scratch’ end of the live coding spectrum in the future, but for now, it is something that I can only look at and think about. It’s akin to the journey of a person learning the piano — they would learn how to read and play sheet music first before learning to write their own.