Exploratory programming

Exploratory programming is an important part of the software engineering 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, C#[1], Dylan, Factor, Forth, F#, J, Java[2], Julia, Lisp, Mathematica, Obliq, Oz, Prolog, Python, REBOL, Perl, R, Ruby, Scala, Self, Smalltalk, Tcl, and JavaScript, 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 and a formal specification. 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.

gollark: Surely you must have some idea. They're in Task Manager.
gollark: What are the actual *specs*, though?
gollark: For example, because of a better scheduler and stuff Threadripper (some Ryzen stuff too?) ran significantly better under Linux for a while, I think.
gollark: I mean, the specs are what actually matter. Also in some cases the software.
gollark: I used it a little.

See also
  • Software Prototyping

Notes
  1. through Microsoft Visual Studio
  2. through its JShell read-eval-print loop interpreter introduced in version 9

References
  • Rajib Mall (1 August 2004). Fundamentals of Software Engineering. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd. p. 32. ISBN 978-81-203-2445-9.


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