Hi, I’m Stefan Ramson
researcher, programmer, game designer
- Working on
- Designing programming systems as a holistic intersection of notation, interface design, psychology, and ergonomics
- Interested in
- Live and exploratory programming, visual languages, alternative input methods, natural programming, AI assistants
- Being a
- PhD student, research assistant
- Currently at
- Software Architecture Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
Selected Projects
I co-created and maintain Lively4, a live, self-sustaining, and wiki-like web-based programming environment and application platform. Lively4 integrates the spirit of Squeak/Smalltalk with modern Web technologies. It allows you to modify applications while they are running and can be loaded into external Websites to script them. We use Lively4 as a vehicle for personal, research, and teaching projects.
I developed Active Expressions, a reactive primitive that adds reactivity as a first-class citizen to state-of-the-art languages such as JavaScript, Python, or Smalltalk. You can define an object-oriented expression and get notified whenever any state change affects the expression's result, triggering your callbacks. Based on this mechanism, you can easily write more involved reactive programming concepts. Available in multiple implementation variants including byte code rewriting, dynamic interpretation, and using proxy objects.
Selected Publications
Editor’s Choice Award 2024 . Programming, 2024. Pronto: Prototyping a Prototyping Tool for Game Mechanic Prototyping . PPIG, 2023. Structured Editing for All: Deriving Usable Structured Editors from Grammars . CHI, 2023. Shortening Feedback Loops in a Live Game Development Environment . VL/HCC, 2021. Zone-based Layer Activation
Personal Favorite . COP, 2020. Proceedings of the 2020 Joint Workshop of the German Research Training Groups in Computer Science . Dagstuhl, 2020. Visual Design for a Tree-Oriented Projectional Editor . PX, 2020. An Exploratory Literature Study on Live-Tooling in the Game Industry . LIVE, 2019. Babylonian-style Programming . Programming, 2019. Exploratory and Live, Programming and Coding . Programming, 2019. Designing a Live Development Experience for Web-Components . PX, 2017. Living in Your Programming Environment . PX, 2017. Group-Based Behavior Adaptation Mechanisms in Object-Oriented Systems . IEEE Software, 2017. Active Expressions: Basic Building Blocks for Reactive Programming . Programming, 2017.