Reading between the lines of code : visualising a program’s lifetime

Abstract

Visual representations of systems or processes are rife in all fields of science and engineering due to the concise yet effusive descriptions such representations convey. Humans’ pervasive tendency to visualise has led to various methods being evolved through the years to represent different aspects of software. However visualising running software has been fraught with the challenges of providing a meaningful representation of a process which is stripped of meaningful cues and reduced to manipulating values and the field has consequently evolved very slowly. Visualising running software is particularly useful for analysing the behaviour of software (e.g. software written to make use of late binding) and to gain a better understanding of the ever-important assessment of how well the final product is fulfilling the initial request. This paper discusses the significance of gaining improved insight into a program’s lifetime and demonstrates how attributing a geometric sense to the design of computer languages can serve to make it easier to visualise the execution of software by shifting the focus of semantics towards the spatial organisation of program parts.