The abstract visual debugger is how I imagine people will be doing development in the future.
Real time, interactive manipulation of objects which represent parts of the program.
Have you considered applying it to a LISP language, like Clojure ?
I've played a bit with building an experimental lisp editor, which doesn't use textual editing, but graphical representation of the forms, pictograms and symbols for core function calls (like map, reduce, filter, sum, etc), 'slots' for function parameters/call arguments, etc.
And it doesn't force you to use your mouse, but allows fast keyboard navigation and various commands for slurping/barfing forms, vi-style.
Eventually, I thought, this should be built in 3D. But I didn't finish it as it was too much work, just played around with the idea.
The cool thing about doing it for Clojure, is that, like any lisp, it can be evaluated in real time and the results animated immediately without restarting the app.
Your visual debugger is making inroads into the same territory I think.
Would you like to explore this idea a bit further together ?
The debugger has a client/server architecture that would make it relatively easy to connect to most languages (server does the rendering and layout stuff, client provides 'monitored' data structures, and sends data structure operations to the server). The clients are pretty easy to write.
Your experimental lisp editor sounds neat. I'm unfamiliar with slurping/barfing, haha.
I might've been interested in some shared exploring in the past, but I really am giving this stuff up for the time being. If you want to share a demo or discuss some particular idea sometime, or something, I can be reached here, though: westoncb[at google's mail service]
The abstract visual debugger is how I imagine people will be doing development in the future. Real time, interactive manipulation of objects which represent parts of the program.
Have you considered applying it to a LISP language, like Clojure ?
I've played a bit with building an experimental lisp editor, which doesn't use textual editing, but graphical representation of the forms, pictograms and symbols for core function calls (like map, reduce, filter, sum, etc), 'slots' for function parameters/call arguments, etc. And it doesn't force you to use your mouse, but allows fast keyboard navigation and various commands for slurping/barfing forms, vi-style.
Eventually, I thought, this should be built in 3D. But I didn't finish it as it was too much work, just played around with the idea.
The cool thing about doing it for Clojure, is that, like any lisp, it can be evaluated in real time and the results animated immediately without restarting the app.
Your visual debugger is making inroads into the same territory I think.
Would you like to explore this idea a bit further together ?