There's an author I know who does "live writes", which are essentially the same as this but for drafts of prose (she does them via shared Google Docs). There's definitely an attraction to watching the story take shape word by word that goes above and beyond just reading the finished product. I can't quite articulate it fully, but as an example, watching her write in real time lets you see which parts are easy and which parts give her trouble, based on how fast she writes and how much she deletes and rewrites things. I could easily imagine the same holds for code. I'm sure I could learn more about both coding and about the coder from watching them write a piece of code than by just reading the finished code.
> There's an author I know who does "live writes", which are essentially the same as this but for drafts of prose (she does them via shared Google Docs).
Harlan Ellison ofter wrote short stories in a storefront using ideas tossed out by on-lookers. I'd love to see the programming equivalent, particular in the game space. It'd go a long way towards settling the art versus science debate--and I doubt there are but a handful (including Notch) who could perform the kind of improv that someone like Ellison did in his medium.
Recently I attended a gathering where about ten people tossed out ideas for an interactive fiction game as it was being live-coded in Inform 7. It was surprisingly fun (and if we had a better grasp of the language it would have been even more).
