In my experience real code can't be represented legibly on a 2D plane. "Generate code map" features of IDEs usually produce incomprehensible graphs, when you try them on actual codebases.
I never tried CodeSee before it shut down, was it any better?
In my experience real code can't be represented legibly on a 2D plane. "Generate code map" features of IDEs usually produce incomprehensible graphs, when you try them on actual codebases.
I never tried CodeSee before it shut down, was it any better?
“Real code” allows you to hide the mess behind imports (I think everyone had experience of dealing with accidentally circular imports at least once in their career) and abstractions. But once you put your code as a graph on a 2D plane, you realise what kind of horror you are dealing with. And sometimes even this trick doesn’t work: For example, it’s hard to abstract away the states and transitions of a finite state machine; so while they may look fine on a diagram, they often look like a mess of spaghetti as code.