Sam Aaron

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT SAM AARON

Sam Aaron is a live coder who, through considering programming as performance, focusses on enhancing the productivity and power of modern programming languages and environments. Sam believes that a programming environment which has sufficient liveness, rapid feedback and tolerance of failure to support the live performance of music is an environment ripe for mining novel ideas that will not only benefit artistic practices themselves but also the computer industry and education more generally.In pursuit of this unique perspective Sam has created Sonic Pi, a free live coding environment designed to large both the needs of education and professional musicians. Previously, Sam was the lead developer on a suite of open source tools: Overtone, a collaborative programmable music environment; Quil, an enhanced Clojure version of the visual language Processing; Emacs Live, a curated suite of Emacs tools, placing strong emphasis on live feedback and visual cues.Through this exploration Sam has been challenged to draw not only from his familiar territories of computer industry and academia but also from the arts, a combination Sam now believes to be essential for the development of well-researched, creative, innovative and practical ideas in this field.Sam sees programming primarily as a form of communication and believes that the pursuit of conceptual efficiency is at least as important as computational efficiency.