Code itself is abstract, which makes it often difficult to understand – sometimes even by the programmers that wrote it. When working with or thinking about code, programers thus often resort to concrete values and execution traces to make the abstract more tangible. Such approaches like exploration scripts in a workspace or unit tests of a test suite are already very helpful, but still lack a convenient conceptual and technical integration into core development tools, leaving such examples and the code they refer to too far apart.

Example-based programming like Babylonian Programming aims at offering the benefits of concrete, live examples directly in program editors, interleaved with the code it supports, to shorten feedback loops and reduce the need for context switches coming with changing tools.

However, Babylonian Programming and its tools currently focus on a local perspective on code exploration, but do not yet extend to message sends outside a particular unit of code and with that do not yet directly support feedback on more dynamic properties of a running program / system.

We developed Probe Log, a Babylonian Programming tool that extends the benefits of example-based programming to scenarios that span across multiple procedures. It provides a linear view on the dynamics of evolving examples beyond a local perspective.