What article discusses "Viewing code from 10000 feet"?

Question

A few years ago I read an article about a neat way to analyze a large code-base.

The idea was to zoom out so far that patterns of indentation and block length are all that is really visible.

The author wrote about printing out code with very small fonts and looking at the results from 10 feet back. I believe the author also had some tools for reformatting code and producing images for this technique, in such a way that paper could be avoided.

I can't find the right search query to bring this up. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

I've done this myself, that is print to paper with very small fonts and step back. If you want to avoid the paper route then perhaps you can print to PDF?

Or use and editor that can zoom in and out by changing font size. I use SciTE and Komodo Edit, both based on the Scintilla code editing engine and both allow me to hold down the ctrl key and use the mousewheel to change font size (just like web browsers).

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With a bit of Google-fu I found references that this (ctrl+mousewheel) may also be implemented in Visual Studio and XCode. Can anyone confirm?

Answer 2

Could extract all the types, classes, etcetera, and put them into a tool such as graphviz and generate a graph.

Answer 3

I think you are referring to Software Visualization? If you search for Code Visualizer, you maybe able to find a few products out there that does it but there are more focusing on aggregating the measurements information/metrics together for software comprehension and not necessary as a way to view or navigating to code only.

Some of the tools include Code city, code crawler or code visualizer. Michele Lanza and his team did some great work in this area in the recent years, however some only has support for certain language/platform so be mindful if they are going to be useful for you.

http://www.inf.usi.ch/faculty/lanza/

http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/wettel/codecity.html

Answer 4

The text editor Sublime Text has a zoomed-out overview of your code on the left of the window, and can be used to scroll.