Ask HN: Effective data visualization operating on source code

4 pointsblintson1 comment

We all see bar charts and line-graphs and histograms, and so on, to show trends and relationships between chunks of data. My question is this: Has anybody here heard of an instance of making graphics using source-code as data that actually solved a specific problem? (Like showing a lisp-program parse-tree web. (though I can't think of any practical application for that either))

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Almost all large software shops have some sort of cheesy "dashboard" for upper management. Some of these analyze source code for line numbers, progress filling in templates, test results, etc.

http://ohloh.net/ analyzes source code of open source projects and reports on them, such as commenting ratio (it warns you about projects that are 15% or less comments depending on language). This solves the problem of people wanting to know the health of certain projects.

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