I think most visualizations suffer from identifying the wrong piece of complexity — the essential complexity is state management, not code management. Ideally,

I think most visualizations suffer from identifying the wrong piece of complexity — the essential complexity is state management, not code management. Ideally, we should be able to visualize state and how state changes. This isn’t a state machine, and it isn’t database modeling. It is an understanding of information flow. Sometimes this flow of information has real-world side-effects (moving a robot’s arm), but mostly this flow is about information being created, transformed, and delivered. I use the word information because this decouples the visualization from concerns about data and modeling. The important thing is information, not necessarily the way we model that information — those kind of visualizations already exist and are helpful for writing code. But the kind of information flow visualization I’m imaging would help us to understand not how to write code, but what code that needs to be written in the first place. The most complex pieces of code tend to be buggy when changes are made to them, because they are acting upon state in ways that are essentially complex and interdependent. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when you update a person’s first name that is is actually affecting systems X, Y, and Z rather than merely systems A, B, and C? Maybe the credit card validation system utilizes the first name in some odd way that your profile page doesn’t, but how would you know that by looking at the code for the profile page? You wouldn’t. An information flow visualization could potentially identify that. Or maybe not. People don’t usually reference visualizations or keep them updated. A visualization would have to be 10x more useful than they are today to become a routine part of the daily grind of software development, ideally built into the dev experience like IDE type errors are. Imagine an analog to jumping to a function definition for a state usage — jumping to a visualization of the information you are about to put your dirty paws upon. I suppose this would require a many-to-many relationship between the information flow visualization and state (and anywhere that state was stored, accessed, or mutated). Fun dream.