I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#12I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
I agree. I think this is the sort of tool that is better off as an open platform on top of which others can build more specific pieces. In some sense, I think a lot of the advantages of programming languages being open apply here.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#13I indexed a few samples. It looks pretty good. Can't use it for work, but definitely makes it really fun to look at source code. Java is 3GL. Python is 4GL.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#14I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
It's odd that we're so reluctant to spend money on quality tools that increase our productivity. It pains me to spend the $300 for my editor even though it has paid for itself dozens of times over. I think we're spoiled by open source(and shareware before that).
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#15Came here to say I paid for this a couple of years ago and found it very useful (ended up using it on both C++ and Java codebases), do give it a try. Sad to see that it didn't make it as a commercial product (wonder what lesson to draw from this ...)
I'm not sure what lesson to draw either, but I kind of suspect that the situations where this tool adds the most value (e.g. a developer needs to jump into a code base without anyone around to help orient exploration) are also the situations where there's least likely to be funding. And in that particular example, if the developer is new to the org, it is a situation where they're unlikely to know how to/feel comfortable asking how to gain funding.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#16I wonder if selling integrations with language server[1] implementations would be a way to multiply the customer base enough to make this viable as a business.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#17Making tools is a hard business to be in, because the customers are very specialized and few in number.
You also tend to compete against free tools (either via licensing or vendor-giveaways)
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#18Came here to say I paid for this a couple of years ago and found it very useful (ended up using it on both C++ and Java codebases), do give it a try. Sad to see that it didn't make it as a commercial product (wonder what lesson to draw from this ...)
I'm not sure what lesson to draw either, but I kind of suspect that the situations where this tool adds the most value (e.g. a developer needs to jump into a code base without anyone around to help orient exploration) are also the situations where there's least likely to be funding. And in that particular example, if the developer is new to the org, it is a situation where they're unlikely to know how to/feel comfort…
Such a tool is not only useful for a junior. It is also useful for (incomplete list I assume)
* The consultant coming to a project for a short period of time
* The software architect, observing the code layout periodically (for example to identify where lower layers of the software depend on higher layers)
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#19I don't get all the posts saying it's sad that it didn't take off commercially. No obstacle prevents grateful programmers from enriching the creators of a useful tool, and expanding the audience of likely users increases the probability of that happening. It's a great looking product (that I had not been aware of when it was commercial) and deserves wide adoption.
It's odd that we're so reluctant to spend money on quality tools that increase our productivity. It pains me to spend the $300 for my editor even though it has paid for itself dozens of times over. I think we're spoiled by open source(and shareware before that).
totally agree, after years of vscode/geany/eclipse/whatever I now pay full annual license for the jetbrains bundle, so that I can focus on coding better, much better.
I do keep my vim around though, for any command line related editing vim will be my first choice, otherwise it will be jetbrains GUI.
I really missed source-navigator which is outdated badly these days, sourcetrail seems the new alternative finally. source-insight was pretty good too but it has no linux version.
Obviously the server is under heavy load, the page is barely reachable and the download stuck at 74MB. Will test this later.
Re: Sourcetrail, interactive source explorer, is now free and open-source
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's odd that we're so reluctant to spend money on quality tools that increase our productivity. It pains me to spend the $300 for my editor even though it has paid for itself dozens of times over. I think we're spoiled by open source(and shareware before that).
totally agree, after years of vscode/geany/eclipse/whatever I now pay full annual license for the jetbrains bundle, so that I can focus on coding better, much better. I do keep my vim around though, for any command line related editing vim will be my first choice, otherwise it will be jetbrains GUI. I really missed source-navigator which is outdated badly these days, sourcetrail seems the new alternative finally. sou…
downloaded it, it seems only works for cmake or you have to have a json database, stop here for now. I would think it can analyse the code directly, as source-navigator did to me. the UI looks shiny, but as far as usability goes, this requirement of cmake/compile.json is one step backwards to me.