  Various programming tools, languages, and environments give programmers the
impression of changing a program while it is running. This experience of
liveness has been discussed for over two decades and a broad spectrum of
research on this topic exists. Amongst others, this work has been carried out
in the communities around three major ideas which incorporate liveness as an
important aspect: live programming, exploratory programming, and live coding.
While there have been publications on the focus of each particular community,
the overall spectrum of liveness across these three communities has not been
investigated yet. Thus, we want to delineate the variety of research on
liveness. At the same time, we want to investigate overlaps and differences in
the values and contributions between the three communities.
  Therefore, we conducted a literature study with a sample of 212 publications
on the terms retrieved from three major indexing services. On this sample, we
conducted a thematic analysis regarding the following aspects: motivation for
liveness, application domains, intended outcomes of running a system, and types
of contributions. We also gathered bibliographic information such as related
keywords and prominent publications.
  Besides other characteristics the results show that the field of exploratory
programming is mostly about technical designs and empirical studies on tools
for general-purpose programming. In contrast, publications on live coding have
the most variety in their motivations and methodologies with a majority being
empirical studies with users. As expected, most publications on live coding are
applied to performance art. Finally, research on live programming is mostly
motivated by making programming more accessible and easier to understand,
evaluating their tool designs through empirical studies with users.
  In delineating the spectrum of work on liveness, we hope to make the
individual communities more aware of the work of the others. Further, by giving
an overview of the values and methods of the individual communities, we hope to
provide researchers new to the field of liveness with an initial overview.
