Re:Maps reveal the structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’...
by Retric on Thursday June 15, 2017 @12:57PM
(#14562131)
I once wrote a static analysis tool that simply made 2 lists for every function. What Object-function it called, and what Object-functions called it. It only mapped around 98% of all calls, but ended up being extremely useful abstraction when handed a huge code base without much documentation or access to the old team.
Re:Maps reveal the structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’...
by justinnhli on Thursday June 15, 2017 @01:47PM
(#14562602)
These are called call graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph
This is all so obvious but it never solidified concretely like this for me until now.
The following domains have a bunch of stuff taken away from them, you're left with a narrow domain of very few concepts, and once narrowed it is intuitive to make a visual tool:
Functional programming may be a way to narrow down the set of "all programs" to a few primitives that can be modeled visually, but not take away so much that it is not useful for general purpose programs. Maybe visualizing pure expressions as a tree of function calls or as an execution graph. IDEs can already do this for imperative & object oriented programs, but you end up with a hairball, the visualization is not useful enough that we no longer need, for example, to write code in files.What other ways can we attack a large domain like "enterprise business apps" and take things away until left with a few simple composable primitives?