Wednesday, September 19, 2012

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.

No comments: