For many years, work on programming tools and environments has been regarded with disdain by many in the academic programming language community. The recent flood of interest in live programming is changing this situation for the better, albeit belatedly. Rather than thinking about programming languages in isolation, we need to think of programming language systems with a holistic view of the programming experience. There are still important research opportunities in this area, whose roots run deep in the Lisp and Smalltalk traditions.

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a software engineer at Google where he works on Dart. Previously, he was a VP at SAP Labs, a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.