• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

text: In his influential essay No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks makes the case that software is inherently "invisible and unvisualizable", and points out the universal failure of so-called "visual programming" environments. I don't fault Fred Brooks for this view -- the visual programming that he's thinking of indeed has little to offer. But that's because it visualizes the wrong thing. Traditional visual environments visualize the code. They visualize static structure. But that's not what we need to understand. We need to understand what the code is doing. Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure.