Befunge but readable mad

Question

Befunge but readable made the rounds of the internet yesterday and caused me to swap in an old interest of mine that I ve flailed ineffectually at in the past e g a way to display a program that makes its large scale structure really obvious rather than obfuscating it as Befunge does One problem I have with Befunge not the one you re thinking of ha and other fungeoids 1 is that you have a bunch of static information about a program visible in 2D on screen but a key piece the stack is invisible The question I keep returning to is how one might go about making the stack or any other run time state used by the program visible without just bolting it on on the side This time around I got hooked on the following metaphor Imagine a spaceship that contains some data sets out on a voyage across an infinite 2D plane and performs various operations depending on the objects it collides with Example 1 The space ship contains a row of boxes Colliding with a number pushes a box on to the nose colliding with an operator operates on the 1 or 2 front most boxes in the front This is a way to display a stack but a stack in isolation doesn t seem to scale well to larger programs Example 2 The spaceship contains a number Colliding with the BF inspired primitives `+` and ` ` 2 causes the number to be incremented and decremented respectively Now build addition out of it Zooming into a number `n` shows it to be a loop of n iterations When the spaceship collides with `n` it loops through n times and the number inside it has n added to it At a high zoom you see the spaceship loop n times before exiting the solar system At a low zoom you see the spaceship exit instantaneously with n added to its value Now you can imagine a reduce operation as a series of solar systems that the spaceship visits one by one Example 3 The spaceship contains a binary heap to insert and delete elements from depending on objects it collides with Zooming into any single collision reveals the tree structure to be the space that a smaller spaceship containing a single number bounces among Two properties that seem important from these examples A hierarchical nature where space and spaceship are duals and zooming in and out causes them to turn into each other Rendering the state of a spaceship needs to be extensible 3 We need to leave Befunge s ASCII behind At the largest scale state machines feel like a really powerful way to represent the state within a spaceship I often find them to be the outermost architecture of a large program But to actually find the state machine I have to flail around for a long time If we could use some visual paradigm at the largest scales but zoom into text as needed programs might be much more comprehensible 1 2 3 Like in my old Pong demo

guitarvydas · Answer

A hierarchical nature FWIW I strongly agree with this phrase A minor change in POV might make this whole problem simpler We need notations that embrace hierarchy and relative ism Lisp lists UNIX relative pathnames StateChart nested machines Kinopio HTML links Dave Ackley all swirl around this flame Force fitting 4D reality down into a single 2D notation causes self imposed accidental complexity epicycles We need to be thinking in terms of trees of stacks trees of CPUs machines phones trees of messages etc