Exploratory programming, as opposed to implementation (programming), is an important part of the

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

cycle: when a domain is not very well understood or open-ended, or it's not clear what algorithms and data structures might be needed for an implementation, it's useful to be able to interactively develop and debug a program without having to go through the usual constraints of the edit-compile-run-debug cycle. Languages such as APL, Cecil,

Clojure Clojure (, like ''closure'') is a dynamic programming language, dynamic and functional programming, functional dialect (computing), dialect of the programming language Lisp (programming language), Lisp on the Java (software platform), Java platfo ...

, C#, Dylan, Factor, Forth, F#, J,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

,through its JShell read-eval-print loop interpreter introduced in version 9 Julia,

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

, Obliq, Oz,

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic. Unlike many other programming language ...

, Python, REBOL,

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, R,

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

, Scala,

Self In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes. The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) same ...

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company ** TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, often in conjunction with an IDE, provide support for exploratory programming via interactivity, dynamicity, and extensibility.

Formal specification versus exploratory programming

For some software development projects, it makes sense to do a

requirements analysis In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the v ...

and a formal

specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

. For other software development projects, it makes sense to let the developers experiment with the technology and let the specification of the software evolve depending upon the exploratory programming.

Similarity to Breadboarding

A similar method of exploration is used in electronics development, called Breadboarding, in which various combinations can quickly be tried and revised, accepting the tradeoff that the result is definitely temporary in nature.

Notes

References

* Programming paradigms User interface techniques {{Soft-eng-stub

Formal specification versus exploratory programming

Similarity to Breadboarding

See also

Notes

References