Towards a live, moldable code editor

Creating and evolving object-oriented applications requires developers to reason about source code and run-time state. Integrated development environments (IDEs) are tools that support developers in this activity. Many mainstream IDEs, however, focus on code editors that promote reading of static text even in the debugger. This affects program comprehension, as developers have to manually link the static code with the run-time objects. In this work we explore how to address this problem through a moldable code editor that enables developers to select executable snippets of code and replace them with graphical views of the resulting objects. Each object can define multiple views that developers can select. This way objects and code coexist in the same editor.