"Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022)

Caption notes

Jack Rusher starts with the experience of handing over punched cards and waiting for a printout, then asks why modern development tools still make programmers wait. He advocates inspecting state, changing code and observing feedback while a program runs, especially with long-lived services or hard-to-recreate interface states. He also identifies a cost: deleting code in an editor can leave a previously evaluated definition in the runtime, so the visible source and program state can diverge. He discusses interactive debuggers, notebooks and structural editors as ways for tools to shorten feedback and make that divergence visible. This guide follows his spoken account. Code and demonstrations await independent verification.