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Software Evolution Storylines, Inspired By XKCD
jamie tips this mind-blowing data visualization concept from (naturally) data visualization researcher Michael Ogawa, who explains that it was inspired by "this XKCD comic. It represents characters as lines that converge in time as they share scenes. Could this technique be adapted for software developers who work on the same code?"
A data visualisation researcher hasn't seen this method of visualising data before xkcd? Really?
Very often it is difficult to see at a glance whether a project is mature and stable or just dead. It would be interesting to see whether this type of visualisation can tell you at a glance how healthy the project is. If so it would be nice to have this view on sourceforge, etc.
Or Across projects. So you can see which developer / client / manager is the most destructive to projects. Or how projects are given to others (like the One Ring in the XKCD example) before ending up in /mnt/doom.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The XCKD comic was a great example of visualization because after a brief time acclimatizing to the layout, I could immediately comprehend it and draw conclusions out of it. Doing the same with a software project would be interesting, but right now all I see is a bunch of tangled lines -- they don't mean anything to me.
Anyone who has worked on this project -- do they mean anything to you? Anyone else -- what do you see in these graphs?
I bet the Windows timeline looks like the one for Primer.
Sure; we've tried every other fad that's come along, might as well try this one also.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Oh wait... :)
Thankfully, SoftVis 2010 (the ACM symposium where his paper is going to be presented) does not take into account reviews from anonymous cowards on slashdot.
Must be tough browsing the web without JPEG images.
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Say what you want, these graphs look like some evil worms from below, kind of parasites that prey on the Deep Ones... Scary.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...but XKCD pretty clearly was inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wallchart_of_World_History (first version 1890).
It's a pretty cool visualization, illustrating in a very superficial way how each state mutates and evolves politically into its descendants.
-Styopa
That's simply false; some programs do something, do it well, and know where responsibility is best handed off to another program. When was the last time ls needed an update?
I am trolling
That must be awkward ... most file extensions do begin with . after all.
Not the way I understand (or my organisation uses) swimlanes.
As is implied by the word swimlane, the diagram shows several horizontal 'lanes', these represent individual people or organisations. Then a flowchart is overlayed onto the swimlanes. Whenever an action is performed by a organisation, the flowchart box for that action is in their lane.
This shows for instance who is responsible for what in a process.
I believe that if, say, LOTR was to be shown as a swimlane. You could have the characters that come into contact with The Ring as lanes across the diagram. And a line moving from one lane to the next as the ring passes ownership but going from left to right as it stays in their grasp.
The diagrans in the article show, in many ways, the opposite. The lanes come together and separate over time showing who is in contact rather than who is doing what.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Most of the time. I'd say you are right but there are exceptions. One example is Privoxy. It'a been nearly the same since the 3.0 release in 2002, but there's been constantly tiny little fixes so it's not abandoned and has had an average 175000 downloads/year not including Linux distros etc. so obviously many people find it useful.
So they're not taking over the world. But is there any point to try to be another jack-of-all-trades software? It does one thing and it does it well, or if you'd want to do it differently you probably need to do it in the browser. Either way there's really no reason to make it part of the same application, this one is "done".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
According to this there are 5 files that start with "ls".
Except for ls.c, all those files have only one entry on their history. The "initial revision" on 1993-06-16.
On the other hand, you can check the history of ls by yourself. Ignoring a "build" commit done on 2010-09-18 (and by the same guy who did the "initial revision" ones), the last commit is from 2010-07-01 with the message header of "ls: use the POSIX date style when the locale does not specify one".
While not extremely important, it does show that ls keeps receiving updates to this day.
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
ls is boring, they should add a feature "ls --im-feeling-lucky" to list a random directory to add some spice back into it.
We did lots of timelines in my perfectly ordinary elementary school a couple of decades ago.
The thing is, you're not even allowed to post on slashdot unless you've already written a far better programming language than Java before your twelfth birthday.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it