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Topic: well (Read 1770 times) |
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mmuday
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well
« on: Feb 26th, 2003, 4:44am » |
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gravity well? well I never? well, well, well.
Motion-damped particles in a finite space, attracted to a particular point, by... gravity? fame? peer pressure? You be the judge.
http://www.averagejackal.net/processing/well/
See also my (similar) entry in interactive form.
It's very cool to see all the things people in the community are posting! Great fun to be a part of this virtual community.
Cheers Ben, Casey, Glen, Benelek, Martin, et al!
-Mark
p.s. - if any of y'all are interested in collaborating on different aspects of code visualization, fire me an email at... mark at figuresix.com
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Martin
    
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Re: well
« Reply #1 on: Feb 27th, 2003, 3:12pm » |
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hi too mark, nice visuals for newtonian mechanics. i was wondering, what do you mean by "code visualization" specifically? 
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mmuday
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Re: well
« Reply #2 on: Mar 2nd, 2003, 11:08pm » |
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I'm interested in the visualization of source code (in particular, but not limited to, Java). There are sort of 3 levels I'm interested in exploring: 1) Medium-scale, which is to say at the level of packages/classes/methods, where qualities of the visualization are driven by attributes of the software. 2) visualization of the abstract parse tree of a method (though not necessarily in a tree form). 3) displaying source code in a way that augments the traditional pure-text view (kind of one or two steps forward towards a more visual representation, but not a total departure from viewing source as text).
There are a couple of reasons for wanting to do this:
The first is that I like data-driven visuals, whether they're useful in the realm of making software or not (for a non-visual example, software that plays music which changes depending on the weather outside); furthermore, programs have a very rich set of information to be mined.
The other reason is that programming is hard--it ends up being an almost completely cognitive task, which humans by and large aren't really all that good at. Comparitively, humans are REALLY good at perceiving patterns, especially visual ones. There might be a lot of utility if we could shift the weight of some aspects of making software from the purely cognitive to the perceptual.
Some of this came about from wanting to teach some design principles to members of my development team, and thinking that it might be easier for them to write good code if they only knew what it *looked* like. This was also reinforced by my reading Martin Fowler's Refactoring book. His notion of "code smells" was really intriguing, and I thought it was interesting that he related micro-level design issues to sensory information. I mean, think of how much better your code would be if you could smell when things were getting ugly/unmaintainable!
Anyway, that's what I'm getting at. Sorry you asked?
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benelek
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Re: well
« Reply #3 on: Mar 5th, 2003, 10:17am » |
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hi mark, this sounds interesting - have u had a look at fry's Valence? also, what about wysiwyg editors? visual prgramming, etc? would u be interested in a more stylized wysiwyg editor?
it seems to me that one of the most influential aspects of programming being in code view is that we ultimately only really use a limmited aparatus for communicating what we want to the computer - a keyboard and mouse (plus a graphics tablet if ur lucky).
-bnlk
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Martin
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Re: well
« Reply #4 on: Mar 6th, 2003, 7:06pm » |
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oic. there's something like that by brad paley at whitney called code profiles (applet/code/info). it might be of interest to you.
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tomek
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Re: well
« Reply #5 on: Mar 6th, 2003, 11:01pm » |
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All very interesting. I know of a small number of research projects focused on source code visualization, but not of any commercially used application. By 'commercially' I mean software that programmers actually use in they work practice. I feel that large number of code visualization projects were aimed at creating some kind of modern 'paintings' giving visual abstraction to code that is often magical to non-technical people.
I am interested in potentially persuing similar projects (both practial and artistic), so any mentions of interesting information visualization tools/research/art are welcome.
Jared Schiffman developed a few projects around his Visual Machine concept. His Turing Machine is both beautiful and quite informative. You can find more details in his Master Thesis:
http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/jarfish/
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Martin
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Re: well
« Reply #9 on: Mar 8th, 2003, 8:57am » |
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on Mar 8th, 2003, 1:21am, benelek wrote:
i'm more interested in seeing a video of it. it, pertaining to the version of valence with rather nice visualization of genomic data. current book reading valence is good but the one with genomic data has nicer form. images are good, videos are better, live apps are the best. 
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fry
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Re: well
« Reply #10 on: Mar 8th, 2003, 8:04pm » |
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hm, yes.. movie.. thanks for the reminder.
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benelek
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Re: well
« Reply #11 on: Mar 9th, 2003, 1:00am » |
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oo, a live app would be fun.
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Martin
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Re: well
« Reply #12 on: Mar 9th, 2003, 11:29am » |
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on Mar 8th, 2003, 8:04pm, fry wrote:| hm, yes.. movie.. thanks for the reminder. |
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looking forward to it.
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mmuday
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Re: well
« Reply #13 on: Mar 10th, 2003, 2:56pm » |
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I'm dying to take a first swing at this code visualization stuff... I've found a good XML java representation at http://javaml.sourceforge.net/
Anyone have ideas about reading xml in Processing?
And now a REALLY lazy question... are imports allowed in Processing?
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