Lambda the Ultimate

A CHI paper on an environment social coding. Abstract:

We introduce a programming environment entitled Share that is designed to encourage loosely bound cooperation between individuals within communities of practice through the sharing of code. Loosely bound cooperation refers to the opportunity community members have to assist and share resources with one another while maintaining their autonomy and independent practice. We contrast this model with forms of collaboration that enable large numbers of distributed individuals to collaborate on large scale works where they are guided by a shared vision of what they are collectively trying to achieve. We hypothesize that providing fine-grained, publicly visible attribution of code sharing activity within a community can provide socially motivated encouragement for code sharing. We present an overview of the design of our tool and the objectives that guided its design and a discussion of a small-scale deployment of our prototype among members of a particular community of practice.

This paper focuses on the environment, but would like to see work on the role of community building in programming language design. We tend to design our languages without considering how to support a community of programmers rather than just one lone programmer using the language to instruct a computer.