Seeing what a program is doing (aka “Software Visualisation” or whatever you name it) may be the next big leap in software development.
This follows logically from the 4 stages of evolution of programs and programming languages namely – Assembly programming, Sequential programming, Functional Programming and present day OOP. At each stage, we tried to manage the lower level complexity by abstracting away using more intuitive models. But if you look back, the life of a software developer hasn’t changed much since the last 40 years.
The situation hasn’t improved much because abstraction was only a band-aid, it never solved the complexity problem. OTOH, Visualisation is a permanent cure, because it aims to show what the program is doing at various levels in various (intuitive)views and hence allows us to come out of the black box mode of development we do today.
Now that we have figured out the solution, the challenge now is to do it right.
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