A Salute to Solo Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#81

Post by ioeu » Sat, Aug 29, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #49

ioeu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate to what you're describing, thanks for sharing. Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells me I'll end up depressed. I've been told more than once I should look into meditation, do you know of a good way to start?

> Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells me I'll end up depressed. Yep! That's the struggle. This guy has a pretty nice intro, with a quick 10 minute or so practice you can do: https://youtu.be/3Uqoxo_jPXQ?t=3m33s Then there's this book which works pretty well as an intro because it's a collection of diverse…

Thanks! I'll hopefully have a look, at some point.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#82

Post by ioeu » Sat, Aug 29, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #50

ioeu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've enjoyed reading more about your approach seeing as it seems to be very alike to what I wanted to try and solve. I wanted to, similar to what you describe, be able to visualize the program's data structures as I visualize them in my head avoiding writing one-off, text-based, sub-optimal printing code. I'm still interested in the idea (i.e. visualizing a program by its state) although I fear it may not be pr…

It remains to be tested, but I'm pretty confident it will work for this—in a significant proportion of cases. You'd only visualize a few data structures at a time, most likely; there are controls like fast forward/rewind and a progress bar, and stepping one operation at a time; and you can just let it run on the side with the self-navigating camera for an extended period of time, and maybe you catch an anomaly. For a…

I'm inclined to agree, I think it should work for most basic types using controls for forward/rewind and optionally only looking at a subset of the data.

A potential problem with visualizing more complex structures may be that people's mental representations for them probably differ, making it really hard to offer a visualization that maps to each person's mental model of each specific (complex) data structure.

What do you mean by: "There are also controls you can't see that make hierarchically navigating from groups of data structures to single data structures to single elements, easy."?

I'm happy we came across then! I find this type of visualiation to be intriguing, and I may give it a stab in the future.

We should definitely keep in touch.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#83

Post by ioeu » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 7:37 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #50

ioeu wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've enjoyed reading more about your approach seeing as it seems to be very alike to what I wanted to try and solve. I wanted to, similar to what you describe, be able to visualize the program's data structures as I visualize them in my head avoiding writing one-off, text-based, sub-optimal printing code. I'm still interested in the idea (i.e. visualizing a program by its state) although I fear it may not be pr…

It remains to be tested, but I'm pretty confident it will work for this—in a significant proportion of cases. You'd only visualize a few data structures at a time, most likely; there are controls like fast forward/rewind and a progress bar, and stepping one operation at a time; and you can just let it run on the side with the self-navigating camera for an extended period of time, and maybe you catch an anomaly. For a…

Did you look for any similar software before you started building? Did you find anything?

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#84

Post by westoncb » Sun, Aug 30, 2015, 8:45 AM UTC

ioeu wrote: post #83

westoncb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains to be tested, but I'm pretty confident it will work for this—in a significant proportion of cases. You'd only visualize a few data structures at a time, most likely; there are controls like fast forward/rewind and a progress bar, and stepping one operation at a time; and you can just let it run on the side with the self-navigating camera for an extended period of time, and maybe you catch an anomaly. For a…

Did you look for any similar software before you started building? Did you find anything?

I didn't beforehand, thinking if there were something for production purposes rather than being purely academic, I'd know about it. I looked later, though, and couldn't find anything. Btw, you can reach me whenever at westoncb[at Google's mail service]