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Creating good software visualization tools is damned difficult, that's why most platform developers don't even try to do it. Most programming tools limit themse
by TuringTest 5y ago
Creating good software visualization tools is damned difficult, that's why most platform developers don't even try to do it. Most programming tools limit themselves to text parsing and tree-building, because tree structures are the simplest to build and layout programmatically.()
There is also a certain scorn for visual languages, because there are hardly any good general purpose languages and there are few developers specializing in the areas where specific ones are most useful. So visualization tools are often confused with them and derided for it.
However, when a good visual tool for programming it is universally adopted, and like what happens with the AI paradox, no longer considered a visual tool (see syntax highlighting, "intellisense" autocomplete, inspect expressions at debugging, file minimaps and function trees...)
() There are some excellent visual tools for software inspection, but they tend to be proprietary and/or tied to a single language or having their own IDE (e.g. see Sourcetrail), so they can't be easily generalized or integrated with other standard development tools, so they get limited usage.
https://www.sourcetrail.com/ https://www.sourcetrail.com/