[kmoser]

I think this idea has promise but I wonder how it would work when many of the visualizations I create to help explain logic wouldn't fit neatly into a DSL/schema. For example, I might use red in some places to refer to data from a particular client, or underlines to indicate constants, or arrows to indicate things that are related from a business perspective but not data or logic flow. I guess this could be standardized, but that almost defeats the purpose of having the computer do the heavy lifting.

In other words, not only does understanding these diagrams assume a ton of knowledge in the problem domain, but the crude tools at hand for creating them (lines, words, symbols, shapes, colors) can be repurposed in so many ways by different people and different projects that I don't see how generic motion detection will be able to detect high level changes. Sure, detecting changed nodes and descriptions might be easy, and possibly useful, but I think there will never be a substitute for human comments like "removed XYZ because the boss said so" or "renamed foo to bar because of IRS regulation so-and-so."