Comments on: "An experiment in organic software visualization."

"An experiment in organic software visualization."

signal — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:56:19 -0800

code_swarm, an animated visualization of open source software project commits. e.g.: Python.

By: cowbellemoo

cowbellemoo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:11:54 -0800

neat!

By: Mach5

Mach5 — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:19:35 -0800

so cool. i love you guido!

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:45:05 -0800

Watched the postgreSQL, which I am interested in using. Neato, and thanks, signal. Bravo to the open source movement!

By: whir

whir — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:47:06 -0800

Dang it, I was going to post this. I like how the author annotates his videos with notable events in the project histories.

By: davejay

davejay — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:36:03 -0800

I have to say, the Python one is surprising, how Guido and a very small group of contributors plug away for years, and then suddenly KABOOM-ITS-THE-CALVACADE-OF-COMMITS.

By: sluglicker

sluglicker — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:47:05 -0800

Interesting idea, visualizing information. The tool:

"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool."

Kind of reminds me of the planetary model of the atom (Bohr). Nice post.

By: effbot

effbot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:08:36 -0800

"how Guido and a very small group of contributors plug away for years" It's called "public source code repository". Before that, we mailed patches to GvR or posted them to mailing lists.

By: effbot

effbot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:35:22 -0800

(it's the KABOOM-ITS-THE-CALVACADE-OF-COMMITS part that's the public repository, of course. the KABOOM at the end is the migration from SourceForge, when all contributors got new user names).

By: jacalata

jacalata — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:46:19 -0800

That's fascinating, thanks signal :)

By: CautionToTheWind

CautionToTheWind — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:29:19 -0800

effbot, do you have any insight on why GvR chose to build Python on Windows on a Microsoft compiler instead of a Free one? That one always bugged me.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:39:27 -0800

This is a really great idea, but high data rates seem to confuse it. Perhaps a somewhat different interface would work better.

By: norabarnacl3

norabarnacl3 — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:20:42 -0800

I love watching the time series at the bottom of the screen. A 1/f noise perhaps?

By: the dief

the dief — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:44:23 -0800

Dammit, I want to run this against some other projects myself, but the checkout recipe here yields bupkuss. Anyone able to actually get the damn code?

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:13:33 -0800

Whoo! Go Team Blue!

By: sleslie

sleslie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:20:02 -0800

Team blue was the documentation team (or guy), which I found fascinating as the "blue" period of Python's development preceded a time of heavy checkins and, as mentioned in the caption, Python's explosion of popularity. I wasn't into Python back then; are there are Pythoners out there who can corroborate this? Was the time after the massive documentation the time of Python's initial popularity explosion?

By: mike_bling

mike_bling — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:05:54 -0800

Too many things that are awesome all rolled into one project! Advanced data visualizations, the history of python and processing.. Love it.

By: plant

plant — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:20:07 -0800

the dief - I managed to check out a copy of .. something .. but it doesn't include any repository data files, tools to create repository data files, or even a description of the format (although this is almost verging on being one), so it's not really ready for random people to use yet. I don't think I really want to look too hard though - the results for the main open source thing I hack on would probably be pretty depressing.

By: plant

plant — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:06:36 -0800

After some idle hackery while I was cooking dinner, I've come up with a reasonably dumb perl script that wrangles history from a git repo into the xml format this thing uses. The results are, as expected, pretty sad when compared to the bright shiny interesting animations for larger projects with more committers and more interesting code structures. I'm currently running it over the last year of webkit development history, since I happened to have that lying around, and that's looking a bit more interesting. Here's my script, in case anyone wants to play with it. It generates 'event formatted' files, so you need to replace the call to 'loadRepository' with 'loadRepEvents' in code_swarm.pde.