

See your code in action with a visualization engine - yushiyoshi
http://aesopacademy.com/landing

======
Gracana
Visualization is neat. What I would like to see, more for debugging purposes
than for learning (but I suppose it would be useful for both), is a debugger
that makes it very easy to graph watched variables, function call frequencies,
etc. Being able to quickly visualize data trends inside a program would be
immensely useful.

Maybe something like this already exists. Am I missing out?

ETA: Make sure to click the "sandbox" link on the aesop academy page. There's
more visualization and better controls available there. Neat stuff... I would
have liked this when I was playing around in my "computer science" class in
high school.

~~~
tonylemesmer
Sounds like the way electronics engineers simulate their designs. sounds like
a great idea.

------
zo1
There is a similar one, for python, here:

[http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit](http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit)

On a side note, does anyone know of a way to "visualize" _possible_ code
execution paths? Sort of like a control-flow graph, where one can easily
count/see the cyclomatic complexity of a piece of code? A library that does
it?

~~~
yushiyoshi
Python Tutor is a great inspiration and benefits from a greater amount of
detail, though I've found it not to be very accessible for teaching beginners
due to its relative complexity. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to see
Philip Guo (the creator) speak at Google, though - really inspiring, and
clearly very passionate about what he does!

For anyone else interested in visualization who hasn't seen it, Bret Victor's
Inventing on Principle is also a wonderful idea of how visualization could
benefit programmers: [http://vimeo.com/36579366](http://vimeo.com/36579366)

------
xerophtye
This seems like an excellent way to teach Programming. I tried it out with
some sorting problem. Pretty cool.

