Re:Visualizing 40,000 student code submissions
by akjetma on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @04:19AM
(#6513603)
Do you still have the image? I've created a few myself and they're really fun to look at. It's interesting to see the symmetry and orderliness of a project in its early stages as compared to the frankenstein's monster it eventually becomes. I'll post mine if I can find or re-run them.
Re:Visualizing 40,000 student code submissions
by chrismorgan on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @05:27AM
(#6513777)
Matter of fact, while I'm still officially employed by that company (part time casual) I haven't worked for them this year at all, having been focusing on the final year of my Uni degree. And the images are at work. So I won't be able to access it for at least a month and a half. I believe the number of classes would now be in excess of 2,500. Certain things have been going on in the past few years which have led to significant growth in both the development team and the number of classes!
The language used is an in-house language, developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and one that has aged surprisingly well (with comparatively few modifications to the language since then), though there are now better options available.
A couple of years ago, I made some abstract art of the inheritance structure of a large project written in a language with (extensively used) multiple inheritance, there being around 1800 classes. No one was game to produce a 15m-wide, 30cm-high wallpaper (the traditional type) of it, so I just removed the class names, leaving classes just dots and made it my computer's wallpaper. It's got quite a few comments. Still, it was nowhere near as pretty as this.