Hackable User Interfaces In Astronomy with Glue

Astronomers typically choose between Graphical User Interfaces and custom-written computer code when exploring and analyzing data. Few tools are designed to encourage both of these workflows, despite their complementary strengths. We believe that such hybrid hackable user interfaces could enable more agile data exploration, combining the fluidity that comes from a GUI with the precision and reproducibility that comes from writing code. In this article we articulate the different strengths and weaknesses of both workflows and discuss how to enable both in a single tool. We focus on Glue (http://glue-viz.org) as a case study and examine how the goal of creating a hackable user interface has influenced the design of Glue.