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

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

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,

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Forth Forth or FORTH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''forth'' magazine, an Internet magazine * ''Forth'' (album), by The Verve, 2008 * ''Forth'', a 2011 album by Proto-Kaw * Radio Forth, a group of independent local radio stations in Scotla ...

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read-eval-print loop interpreter introduced in version 9

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...

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Obliq Obliq is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language designed to make distributed, and locally multithreaded, computing simpler and easier to program, while providing program safety and an implicit type system. The interpreter is wr ...

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Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...

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JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, 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 ...

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