Adopting Design Practices for Programming

International audienceProgrammers continuously design the programs under development. For example, programmers strive for simplicity and consistency in their constructions, like practitioners in most design fields. A simple program design supports working on current and future development tasks. While many problems addressed by pro-grammers have characteristics similar to design problems, programmers typically do not use similar principles and practices developed to address these problems. In this chapter, we report on the adoption of design practices for programming. At first, we propose a new concept for integrated programming environments that encour-ages programmers to work with concrete representations of abstract thoughts within a flexible canvas. Secondly, we present continuous versioning as our approach to support the need for withdrawing changes during program design actitivities