Tools for visualizing code

January 26th, 2009  |  Published in programming  |  2 Comments

When looking through some particularly convoluted code last week I started to wonder if the code was always that complex or if it was a gradual change as several developers attempted to implement the necessary features.

Perforce, which VMware uses for SCM, as well as other SCM systems let you view or check out prior revisions of a file which is helpful, but isn’t all that interesting because you can’t easily compare the files; you end up looking at them one at a time.

Is anyone aware of a tool that will automatically create slideshows or videos of versioned files?  I think it’d be neat to generate a series of snapshots of a file and be able to flip through them and watch the code itself evolve.

This idea was inspired by the code_swarm experiment conducted by Michael Ogawa at UC Davis.  Be sure to follow the link for some cool visualizations of popular open source projects.

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  1. Hacksaw says:

    December 2nd, 2010 at 5:58 pm (#)

    Ever get any responses to this, or any ideas?

  2. kyle says:

    December 2nd, 2010 at 6:14 pm (#)

    I didn’t get any responses, but off the top of my head, one could use the CLI to most SCM systems to print individual versions of the file and trigger a screen capture, then combine the screenshots into a video. You’d only be able to see some small portion of the file though…