Time-awareness in Object-exploration Tools: Toward In Situ Omniscient Debugging
summary
Claims a practical universal tracing mode that keeps historical execution available by storing only changed values, plus space-time inspector tooling that links object state views and temporal traces in Squeak/Smalltalk. Prototype integrates a program tracer into existing inspectors and builds domain views (collections, regex NFA) that compose; regex visualization took about 2 seconds. Evaluation shows temporal navigation stays responsive up to medium-sized projects while some spatial summaries need domain-specific optimizations, and overall the approach works but requires view-specific tuning.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Exploratory programming challenges
- 1:25Research question and contributions
- 2:07Exploratory programming systems
- 3:32Immediacy in tool design
- 4:57Limitations of exploration tools
- 6:23Universal tracing mode
- 9:33Space-time exploration model
- 11:19Demo: Space-Time Inspector
- 14:33Domain-specific exploration views
- 15:58Tracing performance evaluation
- 17:25Impact on programming experience
- 18:48Future work on data flow
- 20:12Conclusion and results
- 21:15Q&A
