PX/27

Welcome to the 13th Edition of the Programming Experience Workshop

Abstract

Some programming feels fun, other programming feels annoying. Why?

For a while now the study of programming has forced improvements to be described through the Fordist lens of usability and productivity, where the thing that matters is how much software can get built, how quickly.

But along the way, something has gone missing. What makes programmers feel the way they do when they’re programming? It’s not usually fun to spend an age doing something that could have been done easily, so efficiency and usability still matter, but they’re not the end of the story.

Some environments, activities, contexts, languages, infrastructures make programming feel alive, others feel like working in a bureaucracy. This is not purely technologically determined, writing Lisp to do your taxes probably still isn’t fun, but it’s also not technologically neutral, writing XML to produce performance art is still likely to be .

Whilst we can probably mostly agree about what isn’t fun, what is remains more personal and without a space within the academy to describe it.

PX set its focus on questions like: Do programmers create text that is transformed into running behavior (the old way), or do they operate on behavior directly (“liveness”); are they exploring the live domain to understand the true nature of the requirements; are they like authors creating new worlds; does visualization matter; is the experience immediate, immersive, vivid and continuous; do fluency, literacy, and learning matter; do they build tools, meta-tools; are they creating languages to express new concepts quickly and easily; and curiously, is joy relevant to the experience?

Beyond all technical topics, PX highlights the the experience that programmers have. What makes it and what breaks it? For whom? What can we build to share the joy of programming with others?

Previous Editions

PX/26 at ‹Programming› 2026, March 16, 2026, Munich, Germany, hybrid

PX/25 at ‹Programming› 2025, June 2, 2025, Prague, Czechia, hybrid

PX/24 at ‹Programming› 2024, March 11, 2024, Lund, Sweden, hybrid

PX/23 at ‹Programming› 2023, March 14, 2023, Tokyo, Japan, hybrid

PX/22 at ‹Programming› 2022, March 16, 2022, Porto, Portugal, online

PX/21 at ‹Programming› 2021, March 23, 2021, Cambridge, UK, online

PX/20 at ‹Programming› 2020, March 23, 2020, Porto, Portugal, online

PX/19 at ‹Programming› 2019, April 1, 2019, Genoa, Italy

PX/18 at ‹Programming› 2018, April 10, 2018, Nice, France

PX/17.2 at SPLASH 2017, October 22, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada

PX/17 at ‹Programming› 2017, April 4, 2017, Brussels, Belgium

PX/16 at ECOOP 2016, July 18, 2016, Rome, Italy

Call for Papers, Essays, Demos

Welcome to the 13th Edition of the Programming Experience Workshop

ℹ️ Regarding Use of Generative AI Tools: This workshop follows the Guidelines of The Programming Journal. If authors are unsure which type would be better suited for their work, we invite them to reach out to the organizers.

Scope

Some programming feels fun, other programming feels annoying. Why?

For a while now the study of programming has forced improvements to be described through the Fordist lens of usability and productivity, where the thing that matters is how much software can get built, how quickly.

But along the way, something has gone missing. What makes programmers feel the way they do when they’re programming? It’s not usually fun to spend an age doing something that could have been done easily, so efficiency and usability still matter, but they’re not the end of the story.

Some environments, activities, contexts, languages, infrastructures make programming feel alive, others feel like working in a bureaucracy. This is not purely technologically determined, writing Lisp to do your taxes probably still isn’t fun, but it’s also not technologically neutral, writing XML to produce performance art is still likely to be .

Whilst we can probably mostly agree about what isn’t fun, what is remains more personal and without a space within the academy to describe it.

PX set its focus on questions like: Do programmers create text that is transformed into running behavior (the old way), or do they operate on behavior directly (“liveness”); are they exploring the live domain to understand the true nature of the requirements; are they like authors creating new worlds; does visualization matter; is the experience immediate, immersive, vivid and continuous; do fluency, literacy, and learning matter; do they build tools, meta-tools; are they creating languages to express new concepts quickly and easily; and curiously, is joy relevant to the experience?

Beyond all technical topics, PX highlights the the experience that programmers have. What makes it and what breaks it? For whom? What can we build to share the joy of programming with others?

Here is a list of topic areas to get you thinking:

• creating programs
• experience of programming
• exploratory programming
• liveness
• non-standard tools
• visual, auditory, tactile, and other non-textual
• languages
• text and more than text
• program understanding
• domain-specific languages
• psychology of programming
• error tolerance
• user studies
• theories about all that

Correctness, performance, standard tools, foundations, and text-as-program are important traditional research areas, but the experience of programming and how to improve and evolve it are the focus of this workshop. We also welcome a wide spectrum of contributions on programming experience.

Submissions

Submissions are solicited for Programming Experience 2027 (PX/27). The thrust of the workshop is to explore the human experience of programming—what it feels like to program, or what it should feel like. The technical topics include exploratory programming, live programming, authoring, representation of active content, visualization, navigation, modularity mechanisms, immediacy, literacy, fluency, learning, tool building, language engineering, and theory building.

Submissions by academics, professional programmers, and non-professional programmer are welcome. Submissions can be in any form and format, including but not limited to papers, essays, and demos. Presentation slots are expected to be between 20 minutes and one hour (if time allows), depending on quality, form, and relevance to the workshop.

Note that an essay is not a research-as-usual paper—it doesn’t contain definitive validation; however, regardless of its form or topic, the essay must have “substance.” An essay may or may not have a conclusion, but it must provide some insight or compelling argument, either directly or indirectly stated; the reader should be left—perhaps after some reflection—in no doubt about the claimed insight or argument. The key characteristic of a successful essay is that it shows a keen mind coming to grips with a tough or intriguing problem in such a way that, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “it explains much and tells much.”

Submissions of academic papers (and essays) directed toward publication should be so marked, and the program committee will engage in peer review for all such papers.

All artifacts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Papers and essays must be written in English, provided as PDF documents (please use the sigconf option, i.e. \documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}), and strictly adhere to the ACM Format.

For review, please include page numbers in your submission and enable the review option for line numbers (i.e. \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}.

Please also ensure that your submission is legible when printed on a black-and-white printer. In particular, please check that colors remain distinct and font sizes are legible.

The recommended page count for a full paper or full essay is about 8-12 pages, a short one about 4 pages. However, there is neither a lower bound nor a strict page limit on submitted papers and essays. In any case, it is the responsibility of the authors to keep the reviewers interested and motivated to read the paper. Reviewers are under no obligation to read all or even a substantial portion of a paper or essay if they do not find the initial part of it interesting.

Publication

Authors of accepted contributions will be invited to present their work at the workshop.

Academic papers and essays accepted for publication will appear in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL) as part of the ‹Programming› 2027 Conference Companion.

Participation

We hope for all authors and interested audiences to be able to travel and attend the workshop in person. For those who do not have this option, we can offer participation via an online meeting. Authors of contributions who must attend remotely are required to submit a video in addition to their artifact in case of technical difficulties.

Both on-site and remote participation require a regular workshop registration.

PX/27 invites audiences beyond those who might traditionally identify as academic researchers. It is our aim to create a welcoming venue where workers with divergent backgrounds can encounter and enrich each other. We welcome participation from workers from academia, industry, independent scholars, and from any others who can see their goals reflected in the PX agenda.

Previous Editions

PX/26 at ‹Programming› 2026, March 16, 2026, Munich, Germany, hybrid

PX/25 at ‹Programming› 2025, June 2, 2025, Prague, Czechia, hybrid

PX/24 at ‹Programming› 2024, March 11, 2024, Lund, Sweden, hybrid

PX/23 at ‹Programming› 2023, March 14, 2023, Tokyo, Japan, hybrid

PX/22 at ‹Programming› 2022, March 16, 2022, Porto, Portugal, online

PX/21 at ‹Programming› 2021, March 23, 2021, Cambridge, UK, online

PX/20 at ‹Programming› 2020, March 23, 2020, Porto, Portugal, online

PX/19 at ‹Programming› 2019, April 1, 2019, Genoa, Italy

PX/18 at ‹Programming› 2018, April 10, 2018, Nice, France

PX/17.2 at SPLASH 2017, October 22, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada

PX/17 at ‹Programming› 2017, April 4, 2017, Brussels, Belgium

PX/16 at ECOOP 2016, July 18, 2016, Rome, Italy