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But most things we see are 2D outputs (webpages, world if you close one eye, text console,..).

I think the closer we are to the bret Victor's ideal (of seeing what you do directly) is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs (react-hot-loader + redux). And this is already practical.

Another nice tool who's the near his ideal is the chrome dev console: visual interaction, live edit, start/stop debugging,..

The future is bright.




But the amount of code that deals directly with producing such output is usually very low, as a proportion of the total amount of code in the system. Having a pane on the right say '825' next to the 'printf("%d\n", do_the_actual_work(foo, bar));' in my code isn't useful. I already get that from the terminal. The place where the benefit would actually appear is visualizing the parts of the code that are doing the complex and error-prone tasks in the system.

If you're a frontend web developer, then sure, it could be useful for you. But with the kind of stuff I do personally, the 2D output demonstrated in the article is irrelevant. Most stuff is much more abstract, and has zero relationship to direct production of visual output. It looks cool and all, but ultimately I feel like it's focusing on the easy problem rather than the important one.

There are a few examples in there of visualizing the values in a for loop over time, but again, I feel like this is unrealistic. The proportion of my code that only executes for a fixed number of iterations that is easily determined at compile-time is negligible. As is iteration over a fixed, compile-time set of values. Most code lives inside functions that can be called with different combinations of parameters, interspersed with multiple nested loops and conditionals at different levels in the call stack, etc. Visualizing something like that in a useful way is much more difficult. If they can show an example of that, I'd be very interested. Until then, it seems more like a toy. A very interesting, promising toy, but still a toy.

The unit test example gets a bit closer, but it's still just dealing with the output of all the code that actually does the work, not the details of that code itself. A tool like this should be helping you with the hard tasks rather than the easy ones, because the easy ones are already, well, easy.

I'm not trying to be hostile, it certainly looks cool, and it looks like it could potentially be very useful in the future. It's just that currently it doesn't look like it would have any practical utility for me.


Chrome dev tool is a mess of half baked, half implemented, inconsistent ideas.

Take the CSS editing, incredibly annoying, impractical, opaque behaviour. Or every option using regexes so just to exclude some files you have to muck around with the bloody things. Or the hover to display local value of variables kinda working, but not always, but highlighting usually works, but watch variables are stupidly in the tiny width window to the right so you can't read the end of the variable name which is usually the really important bit.

And don't even get me started about their shitty redesign of the files making it harded to find the local files, the only ones you actually care about, and giving far too much visibility to external libraries.

But then they do genius things like unobtrusively display the method input variables.

Don't get me wrong, dev tools is useful, but quite obviously designed by a programmer who's experimenting with various different UX paradigms. Chrome dev tools is a joke when you put it against a real dev tool like visual studio.




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