We often face impediments to the realization of creative and productive work. These impediments take many forms, social, temporal and technical, and any effort to ameliorate them has the potential to further creative output and afford a more satisfying degree of personal expression. This dissertation examines strategies for removing such impediments by considering immediacy to be the primary concern informing the design of creative coding environments. We examine immediacy as it relates to the execution of artistic works as well as the social aspects of creative production: publication, browsing of prior work, consulting with peers and collaboration. We explore high-level abstractions and meta-programming strategies as a mechanism for simplifying the creation of audiovisual mappings, user interfaces and signal processing graphs in an effort to remove barriers between conceptualization and realization. Although prior literature argues that creative coding is best served by domain specific languages, we argue that our research augments the expressiveness of general purpose programming languages and obviates much of the need for domain specific solutions. We document various implementations of this research and their contributions to a new audiovisual authoring environment, Gibber, designed to improve immediacy in creative coding.