A good few code visualization projects seem wrapped up/sidetracked in unraveling the complexities of their algol-like host langauges. Concatenative and rewrite systems, on the other hand, are often so simple, I have a hard time even imagining what a useful visualization would be. VM debugger can be too opaque/indirect, intermediate term rewrites are cool, but maybe too transparent to provide heuristic perceptual data. Less of a one-is-better argument, and more of a 'I wonder what I'm looking for'. Like, I wonder how much of the visual PL/structure editor space is devoted to trying to derive legibility from languages that have some degree of counterintuition baked in.
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@inscript I don't have much insight about this, but I've recently spent some time trying to see what mindspace different languages afforded me, and while not necessarily being visual, languages without stackframes have a very spacial aspect that lends itself well to visual programming.
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@inscript One rewriting systems, Fractran in particular, was originally specified by Conway alongside a way of visualizing the rewrite rules themselves as a kind of graph where each node was a possible state of the program, which I find useful.
But the distance between the actual fractran program and its graph is so close, compared to an algol where almost all the information of the program is obfuscated when turned into a graph(one in which only function names remain) due to the algol language's complicated syntax being so far removed from what can legibly be encoded into a bunch of lines and circles.
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP210-s23/madMath/Conway87.pdf
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@neauoire neat! very helpful comparison. it hadn’t occurred to me that only function names would remain when encoding algol-likes. are you aware of any visualizations/diagrams of stack-based languages?
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@inscript I've been reading about this topic a lot lately, I've come across Wirth's paper on EULER, I think this might interest you: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/365153.365162
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@neauoire this looks great! first read of the year. Happy new year, Devine!
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