Will Crichton

A hypothesis: for live programming to scale beyond toy programs, generic low-level visualizations aren't enough. Instead, we need Live Literate Programming: better tools for creating *program-specific* views, which communicate our higher-level understanding.

Bearish on program visualization right now. People have been trying to vis code for half a century, and nothing has worked. All we have are Doxygen inheritance diagrams. My guess: without a more principled understanding of program comprehension, we can't build effective vis.

First, you understand the tasks. Then you use cognitive principles to match the needs of the tasks to the best representation. For example, data visualization has done this well. We know why pie charts are bad, when to use a line vs. scatter plot, so on.

Hmm I think I agree with this sentiment... To me, Learnable Programming communicates some key tasks/goals (esp. "follow the flow", "see the state") that resonate w/ my experience and provide guidance on what viz to use, curious what you think of those http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ …

I see Learnable Programming as high-level design principles for program understanding/authoring tools, in the same vein as the cognitive dimensions of notation. They're a useful lens, but sometimes hard to evaluate, or know if you've applied them correctly.

For example, instead of Processing, imagine a Rails dev making a CRUD website. I have an asset pipeline, a database, so on. How do I visualize a database? A transaction? A server connection? A thread pool?