> > establish[ed] refactoring tools that are well understood and > tested >
New modes of working need new tools to be developed. Prior paradigm tools are for the prior paradigm. How many good tools exist now that will turn linear code into a nice looking readable flow chart? Few? None really? Take a look at the LabView interface. Google "LabView" and click on "images" -- those visual things are programmable. Clicking on something will take you inside it, where the things inside are programmable as well, and so on. The comments in the code above were in the original code from the book. But that reminds me -- *another idea* that I have is to merely add special comments to code. These comments would have a formal structure that would tell how to arrange the associated block of code in a graphical fashion. Something that would be a bit like UML, but less heavy handed. Something that could be "thinly" added a bit at a time to existing code that would allow a flow-chart to be "extracted" directly from the source. These special comments would also work across languages -- almost every source file in a project allows comments (get on it JSON!). Imagine getting a new employee and telling her/him to "go add markup to the such-and-such project source code until the grapher tool can extract a nice high-level diagram". The employee would learn the code while producing the nice diagram -- allowing others to quickly "see" the structure of the project. Add 3 of these special comments, and you would get a 3 block diagram. And 300 of these special comments, and you would get a large complicated thing tying almost everything together. A "linter" would come along and tell you which comments don't really match its containing block quite correctly. That approach would not be as advanced as a real visually oriented programming language, but would be rather useful, and a step in the right direction. Best, Warren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/8b0b69e3-8443-47fd-b6c8-180ec818eb22%40googlegroups.com.
