J-Fall 2017 Speaker Sam Aaron – Live Coding Time & State with Sonic Pi
Live Coding systems encourage us to think extremely differently about programming languages. In addition to considering standard requirements such as reliability, efficiency and correctness we are also forced to deal with issues such as liveness, coordination and synchronization all whilst working in real time.
Live Coders not only run and modify our code live — they often performing with it live on stage in front of large crowds of people who really don’t want the code to miss a beat. In this code and demo-heavy talk, Sam will introduce the motivation for Sonic Pi – a system designed specifically for live coding music – before taking a deep technical dive into the internal ideas and innovations. The audience will explore Sonic Pi’s novel temporal semantics which allows multiple concurrent threads to execute in synchronization whilst still allowing live hot-swapping of code.
Ultimately, everyone will discover an exciting an exciting area of programming language research in an approachable and instructive manner all whilst making some sick beats and drops.
Bio Sam Aaron:
Sam Aaron is a live coder, educator and researcher. He was the lead developer of Overtone and Quil – Clojure-based projects for the expression of sound and image. More recently he has created Sonic Pi – a live programming environment for creating music from code with a focus on education. By day he’s a researcher within the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, by night he can be found coding beats in nightclubs.
