One could say this is... food for thought

Sort of reminds of a what a 3D version of what a lot of if-this-then-that/AI workflow builder tools look like!

Has this friend posted this pic or game at any public links? I’d like to be able to link to this picture from a blog post about ways to present recipes

Been thinking about this a lot in sketch form! @Conrad Godfrey you should see this

Cameron Yick no direct link unfortunately. Its from a steam page: store.steampowered.com/app/2455360/Cooking_Simulator_2_Better_Together . I should have mentioned him actually 😓 He's Dawid Ignar. He was an art director for that game and is doing some freelancing now.

Ah, I've found a linkable page actually: store.steampowered.com/news/app/2455360/view/511840624511551165

Paul Tarvydas from the link article " My contention is that all popular programming languages are essentially designed for write-only use. " I get that! I'm very suspicious of the written form of programming as the complete and final representation. It feels (in my gut) like wired/graphical visualisations are much more readable. But it's only a feeling because I've only ever coded with text and not really with visual node/wire interfaces. These days I'm more thinking that there is no one view that can show everything: the interface, the logic, the data... So, maybe just being able to add additional views onto the map of the application seems like the way to go, and be able to zoom in and out of each. And perhaps this was not exactly what you were getting at. Cheers!

@Daniel Harris That's exactly the premise of Moldable Development. Which in my experience (about five years now) is very powerful.

Paul Tarvydas The way this is implemented in Glamorous Toolkit (Smalltalk) and my own HyperDoc (Common Lisp) is OO. The image is attached to the class that it documents, by implementing a method that returns the image. That should work in Python as well.

Thanks Konrad Hinsen I clearly need to deep dive into Moldable Development. Could these views be created by configurable no-code? [Disclaimer: I want non-developer end-users to be able to build apps using no-code. I'm not interested in AI at the core.] Hope I'm not hijacking this thread.

@Daniel Harris I am not the right person to answer this question, because I have zero experience with no-code environments. Worse, I don't really understand the concept of no-code.

@Daniel Harris I am a proponent of "data visualization driven programming" (which is a term I made up). Certain data are better visualised (e.g. a map, a ui) and so code should be augmented with visual views, and it should definitely support multiple views of the same thing.

Specifically visualizing code structure this demo page has 2 reactive code maps on opening

tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/notebooks/@tomlarkworthy_lopecode-vision.html#view=R100(S50(@tomlarkworthy/[…]S25(@tomlarkworthy/cell-map)),S25(@tomlarkworthy/cell-map))).

They are not static images, they are live projection of the runtime state. If you change the code they change too. Quite useful for refactoring.

Note most coding focuses on the code, not the running program, but in a notebook environment those two things are unified in a single runtime so I feel that that is an important preparatory step.

looping back to Paul Tarvydas, Are we interested in associating an image with a @dataclass schema , or are we interested in associating images of a live system. Operationally I think the 2nd is more useful. I think about code as the control plane, vs the running program as the data plane. For debugging, the dataplane is the real system we are usually interesting in understanding more of.

I think about code as the control plane, vs the running program as the data plane.

That's a nice image! I'd add narratives as the documentation plane. My main gripe with traditional notebooks is that they confound the control and the documentation plane, by forcing the two into a single linear structure. But I fully agree that computation in the data plane is what we ultimately care most about, and should be able to inspect, understand, and debug.