  Source code is inherently abstract, which makes it difficult to understand.
Activities such as debugging can reveal concrete runtime details, including the
values of variables. However, they require that a developer explicitly requests
these data for a specific execution moment. We present a simple approach,
RuntimeSamp, which collects sample variable values during normal executions of
a program by a programmer. These values are then displayed in an ambient way at
the end of each line in the source code editor. We discuss questions which
should be answered for this approach to be usable in practice, such as how to
efficiently record the values and when to display them. We provide partial
answers to these questions and suggest future research directions.

Software Engineering;Programming Languages