Hi all,
I’m writing to share a CFP that may be of interest to people studying programming/code as text. I’m on the program committee for this workshop. The workshop largely comes from computer science, but is very interested in interdisciplinary work and humanistic approaches to code. Paper submissions are due January 9, and accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. https://2026.programming-conference.org/home/px-2026
12th Edition of the Programming Experience Workshop (PX/26)
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 <bureaucratic></bureaucratic>.
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?
PX also covers 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.
Hannah Ringler, PhD (she/her)
https://hannahringler.github.io
hringler29