That's an incredible idea. Explicit self-documentation is one of the biggest problems with source code. We have the goals of the code in our head, we write the code, then we don't bother to write down the goals. Which means that the next person to come along has to read our code and try to intuit what our goals were when writing it.
A system like you're proposing could even auto-generate perspectives that would be useful to document, by watching the user coding, or by observing runtime behaviour, and tracking which objects talk to each other frequently. A little Bayesian learning and you could have a nice perspective-creation system too. :D I think a lot of these ideas are shared by the Portland Multiview project: http://multiview.cs.pdx.edu/ They've got a number of interesting publications. On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Thiago Silva <[email protected]>wrote: > Watching the demo of this project reminded me of a draft of a proposal > I wrote last year, with the goal of exploring self-documentation, > threating source code as hypertext (I was reading a lot on Engelbart's > NLS, Ted Nelson, Intentional Software and Symbolics Genera at the > time). > > For instance, I was missing the possibility to do things like > gathering a bunch of related code on the screen (regardless of "files" > or any kind of namespaces they might belong to), perhaps hyperlink > them, write some explaining text (or mix with drawings, animations, > ...), and using that screen as something like a squeak project. That > was pretty much what I saw in the demo of codebubbles. > > I was mainly attracted to the idea of having a few of these > "projects", each representing a given point of view of a subsystem or > aspect of the software, hyperlinked and all, to create some kind of > narrative to help explain and explore the inner workings of the > software (as opposed to be exposed to the usual directory tree with a > bunch of source files, or the class browser with a bunch of classes, > where we end up having trouble figuring out where to start, how things > relate and collaborate or what they actually mean). > > -- > Thiago Silva > Computer Science > M.Sc. Candidate at Federal University of Pernambuco > jabber/gtalk: [email protected] > http://blog.sourcecraft.info > > > On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Andrey Fedorov <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Reminds me of Squeak. Great for reading code, but still needs a bit of > > innovation on how to "visually" edit code. > > _______________________________________________ > > fonc mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
