[taeric]

I really really want to like these sorts of visualizations. But they just fall flat on me.

The "you can see really quickly..." text is scrolling by and I'm like... "Nope, that picture still means nothing to me." :(. It starts highlighting different parts and I'm completely at a loss on what is highlighted.

I do think this can be very effective once I'm trained on it. Such that I plan to play with it. But I just don't visually think of programs in anything close to this manner.

Anyone know if studies that explore how we think of our programs?

[withinboredom]

Anecdotally, I don’t visualize my code, however there is a sense of distance and depth between things (in the functional sense, not the lexical sense).

I feel like this visualization goes a long way to showing the distance I feel when working on the code, but that’s only because the visualization captures the lexical distance and we generally group functionally close things together.

[taeric]

I don't have a sense of depth at all. I do have some concept of linearity of the control flow. But, it is a shallow knowledge that I couldn't visualize or even describe using visual terms.

I also confess that I think my best understanding from code is not at all linear in the textual representation, either. Sure, small code fragments are easy to reason about in a top down, left right fashion. But most of my understanding is a lot more disconnected than that.

Frustrating, as I do like pure functions, when I can get them. But... I also like knowing what the "metaphor" for a program is such that I can also reason about what it is doing.

This is best termed for me, ironically, in a graphical sense. Seeing a cube that is rotated 45 degrees is easier to understand in a Logo like language where the directions are the same, except for the initial condition. (I may just have a soft spot for Turtle Graphics. :D)

[withinboredom]

Interesting! My sense of “depth” is highly correlated to how “foundational” the code is. Meaning that changing “deep” code will require changing lots of things to keep things working or may break unrelated things far away (sorta like brittleness).

[taeric]

This makes some sense. That said, I also view it similar to how you would consider a keystone on an arch. That is, it may be something at the surface, not necessarily down below. (Which gives the tell that I view depth as down. I'm realizing as I type this that that is not necessarily true.)