> Afterwards a couple of people said it was the most important demo they'd ever seen, comparing it even to the Mother of all Demos. For many there was a sense that the whole world of software development had just changed.
Best demo we ever gave while I was there, by a longshot.
The only thing that is notably missing from IDEA is the graphical representation: but raise your hand if you ever missed to see your program represented as a flowchart, for example. Does it actually have any real value? Perhaps, while you are learning programming.
The diagrams that are actually important and useful are mostly architecture diagrams and are impossible to create from source code - and it is also very hard to generate meaningful programs from architecture diagrams.
(raises hand).
>Does it actually have any real value?
Yes.
>Perhaps, while you are learning programming.
Or when you're trying to understand the structure of a program you've just been assigned to work on, or that you wrote years ago and have to do a change, or when you want to see the big picture, etc etc.
Ever worked with a visual language?
Watching Eric Evans talk about DDD along the example of maps was a real eye opener for me. This: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/model-to-work-evans
I tried to use tools like Enterprise Architect in the past but failed to produce anything useful with them (that includes architecture diagrams - charts based on standards never seem to be fit for what I actually wanted to communicate).
The closest I ever got to usefulness was with database structures, we did manage to generate the actual production schema from ERwin for a SQL database at one place I worked, but of course, not the stored procedures.
While some tools might be more or less accommodating, there's nothing about visual representation per se that can't do that (including filtering the non-important parts, producing something akin to UML's interaction diagrams, etc).
We'll probably see SSIS and Excel integration soon...