Dan Ingalls is the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. Dan also invented BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, as well as pop-up menus. Dan received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a recipient of the ACM Grace Hopper Award, and the ACM Software Systems Award.

Robert Krahn is a software engineer and researcher who designed and implemented the current version of Lively. His areas of expertise include software construction kits, dynamic programming languages, and full stack web development. While working at Zendesk he got experience in building user facing products for a startup.

robert@kra.hn

danhhingalls@gmail.com

The Lively universe creates community cohesion, connects a world of devices and empowers creativity

• Live Designer’s Notebook: Integrated focus on creative leverage in an archival environment

• Objects First! – a better take on learning to code

• Playful but deep learning environment, no artifical walls

• Rapid prototyping and “lifting” for the Internet of Things, expert systems, and other markets

• Live and rich development and debugging environment for the cloud

• Connect a running spreadsheet application with powerful end user programming tools to visualize, script, and process data

By coupling Lively to non-live systems we can add dynamic behavior and live scripting to otherwise static systems as well as rich mashups combining applications and data sources.

Examples are:

• Interactive data visualizations with Aran Lunzer’s LivelyR

• Scripting behavior in VR with David Smith’s CEO Vision

• Immediate feedback and debugging in cloxp, a live Clojure IDE

Most sketching systems provide similar tools to the artist. But providing a view onto the underlying operations offers the power to bring art to life.

The user’s actions become active objects that can be invoked without having to learn a programming language.

This creates a natural onramp from informal sketches to live simulation.

The power of action blocks brings a sketched clock to life.

An always accessible live meta system provides live changes, immediate feedback, powerful tools and enhanced productivity.

Our latest platform provides a formal basis for tracking changes. At the simplest level, this affords undo/redo of all operations and even time-travel debugging.

Moreover, this suggests a model for the entire computing experience, where all prior work can be revisited in its active state with the same rigor as a lab notebook.

The Lively metasystem allows travel back and forth through changes in time. Our goal is to keep a Time-Machine-style record of all work done in this environment.

With the power of the core system available, we can bridge the gap between concrete objects and abstract properties, and also between concrete actions as program elements.

In Lively we freely move between simple “blocks programming” and actual JavaScript code.

Seamless transistions between user actions, block-style programming, and actual program code (JavaScript).

In just a couple of minutes, Lively can reach out to the web or even the operating system to fetch real time data, and that can be connected graphically to one of a number of available visualizations.

Exploring the power of a live meta system for education, design and creative thought