[orodley]

But the amount of code that deals directly with producing such output is usually very low, as a proportion of the total amount of code in the system. Having a pane on the right say '825' next to the 'printf("%d\n", do_the_actual_work(foo, bar));' in my code isn't useful. I already get that from the terminal. The place where the benefit would actually appear is visualizing the parts of the code that are doing the complex and error-prone tasks in the system.

If you're a frontend web developer, then sure, it could be useful for you. But with the kind of stuff I do personally, the 2D output demonstrated in the article is irrelevant. Most stuff is much more abstract, and has zero relationship to direct production of visual output. It looks cool and all, but ultimately I feel like it's focusing on the easy problem rather than the important one.

There are a few examples in there of visualizing the values in a for loop over time, but again, I feel like this is unrealistic. The proportion of my code that only executes for a fixed number of iterations that is easily determined at compile-time is negligible. As is iteration over a fixed, compile-time set of values. Most code lives inside functions that can be called with different combinations of parameters, interspersed with multiple nested loops and conditionals at different levels in the call stack, etc. Visualizing something like that in a useful way is much more difficult. If they can show an example of that, I'd be very interested. Until then, it seems more like a toy. A very interesting, promising toy, but still a toy.

The unit test example gets a bit closer, but it's still just dealing with the output of all the code that actually does the work, not the details of that code itself. A tool like this should be helping you with the hard tasks rather than the easy ones, because the easy ones are already, well, easy.

I'm not trying to be hostile, it certainly looks cool, and it looks like it could potentially be very useful in the future. It's just that currently it doesn't look like it would have any practical utility for me.