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> There is some stigma that visualization is for fakers - "real programmers only use a bare text editor" That stigma would have gone away long ago if the actua
by adrianratnapala 9y ago
> There is some stigma that visualization is for fakers - "real programmers only use a bare text editor"
That stigma would have gone away long ago if the actually existing visual languages were less wretched. (I'm looking at you LabView!). No doubt there are better languages than LabView, but while I think a visual language can be good, creating one will involve many as-yet-unknown unknowns. So even good attempts will be toys at first.
A good stepping stone would be visual analysis of textual programs. I want a debugger for a data-flow graph where following edges answers the question "what caused this value to be what it is". And I want to visualise that graph as well as possible, so that I can get an overview of the different possible causes.
- guitarbill 9y agoIronically, some disassemblers (most famously IDA) offer a kind of graph view for visual analysis. Also, IntelliJ - which is fantastic - has had data flow analysis for years: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/08/analyzing-dataflow-with-intellij-idea/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2009/08/analyzing-dataflow-w...
- theincredulousk 9y agoOnce someone makes this that works properly with arbitrary C/C++ and threads/interrupts, I honestly believe it will be a revolution in productivity. As mentioned below, others (esp. IDA) make it so glaringly obvious that how you were working before was way harder than it had to be.