Idea: Use a map framework to depict code

Today's XKCD comic and its interpretation as a zoomable view using Leaflet had me thinking of the possibilities this presents:

Software cartography already demonstrated how code could be converted into a map. It even has the interesting property that it attempts to map the mental model of the code instead of its specific implementation - which IMO is way better than something like Code City simply because the city (or country) looks the same even if a few buildings disappear - if you know what I mean.

The only missing piece is scale - how do you scale this up to larger and larger codebases? Well, using a map engine is one way, IMO.

The problems of scale have already been solved there, as is that of display form factor: most of the map frameworks are already mobile-ready. The UI metaphors are familiar with most people too.

The only possible thing that detracts from my grandiose view of an n-dimensional version of CodeBubbles  to depict the true complexity of code is that map engines are decidedly 2 dimensional. But even that is a weak argument - layers provide sufficient degrees of freedom to annotate the display appropriately.

Why new bottles with the same old wine works... everytime!

I attended the second BangaloreJS meet today. The sessions were good and so was the food; and I met some really interesting people so in all a fun time was had.

Before the sessions started, however, Jon - the meetup organizer - showed a quick demo of Yeoman: a new tool released by Paul Irish and some of his friends from Twitter that eases building client-side JS projects.

I had a senior moment when I finally realized what it was.

This was Rake in client-side JS clothing, which was ant in Ruby clothing, which was make in Java clothing, which was ... I dont know what came before make because that was waaay before I was born, but I know there was something else that all the cool kids left for make.

Yes, I realize this does way more than a simple build tool; much like rake does way more than just build code. And it did it in a way that seemed magical when it came out first, too. You could do all that with ant tasks/plugins but it was not the same thing. But that's besides the point. It was a build tool in its core.

Why do we as developers keep.reinventing.these.common.tools?

Answer: For the same reason tool vendors have different versions of the same tool by language.

See, I happened to be browsing JetBrains' website the other day and saw that they claim that their non-Java IDEs share the "same features as other Jetbrains IDEs" or something to that effect. It struck me that they surely have a generic base version of the IDE that is skinned and customized for each "vertical" i.e., language-specific IDE.

Why then do they have one tool per language?

Because there are very few polyglot programmers in the world. Majority of us stick to one language, maybe a platform with a few related ones. That's IT. So we want something that "speaks to us, knows our problems", not something that can boil the PL ocean. And why would we need all those generic, all-language features anyway, right?

So the vendors sell us the shiny new bottles. And we drink it up.

And that's the way it should be. Why should client-side JS devs (who are in an unprecedented hype cycle after a long winter) be grudged a "robust and opinionated client-side stack, comprised of tools and frameworks that can help developers quickly build beautiful web applications"?

Note to self: When you finally finish creating Fluent, remember to brand it by language. FluentC, FluentRuby, FluentJava all sound very usable :)

The "Save Download to Category" Browser Add-on

I download things all the time, and all of them to go to the same place always - my downloads folder. Its nice to have a single place to look at all the things I downloaded, but most of the time, I'm moving the download to someplace else once its downloaded. This two step process is annoying.

So the idea is this:
Have a browser add-on that allows you to pick where to put the downloaded file(s) with one click. Preferably with category tags that map to actual folders.

Todo: Check if something already exists. It most probably does.