Expressions on the nature and significance of programming and play
Abstract
Play is all around us, an essential and innate phenomenon that serves as an important mediator in creativity, interest, learning, and drive. Though play is thought to be universal, the way in which it materializes is situationally-dependent and not well-understood, particularly in software engineering. To understand how programmers express the concept of play, we conducted a qualitative study on the online social news website, Hacker News - a venue for software practitioners. From Hacker News, we qualitatively analyzed nearly 1,000 user-submitted comments containing the terms “programming” and “play.” The contribution of this work is a contemporary synthesis of how software practitioners interpret programming and play in experiential terms. Our findings suggest how programming and play can be understood through rich metaphors, among them, play as: art, playgrounds, spontaneity, and tinkering. Hacker News authors reflect about childhood experiences as a catalyst for learning programming, and contrast play against work.
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Analysis of online sources such as Hacker News, YouTube, Reddit, and other online fora has shed light on aspects of programming practice such as programming as play, the introduction of the lambda function into Excel, and the first generation of code-generating large language models.
“Analysis of online sources such as Hacker News, YouTube, Reddit, and other online fora has shed light on aspects of programming practice such as programming as play (Barik, 2017), the introduction of the lambda function into Excel (Sarkar et al., 2022b), and the first generation of code-generating large language models (Sarkar et al., 2022a).”
From Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence (2025) · cites this paper as Barik, 2017
Cites
I heart hacker news: expanding qualitative research findings by analyzing social news websites
Barik, T., Johnson, B., & Murphy-Hill, E. (2015) · Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2786805.2803200 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
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Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence
Sarkar, A., & Drosos, I. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.23253 · Cited by 11 · see citing works
“…sources such as Hacker News, YouTube, Reddit, and other online fora has shed light on aspects of programming practice such as programming as play (Barik, 2017), the introduction of the lambda function into Excel (Sarkar et al., 2022b), and the first generation of code-generating large language…”
- Authors
- Barik, T.
- Affiliations
- North Carolina State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Barik, Titus
- ORCID
- Barik, Titus
- Venue
- 2017 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2017-10
- Volume
- 10
- Pages
- 145-153
- ISSN
- 1943-6092 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2770826549
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2022: 1 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 0.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Teaching and Learning Programming
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Keywords
- play, programming, software professionals, Hacker News, programmer experience, creativity, tinkering, spontaneity, online developer communities
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