Hello! I've been listening to the podcast for a few months, and it's lit up some old neural pathways of mine, left over from my undergrad dissertation project, a (doomed) attempt to make functional programming more legible to learners through alternative visualisations of the code. Glad to be here!

Curious to hear how it was doomed!

The idea was to come up with a way to visualise the beta-reduction process in a way that would be useful to beginner programmers (think animations of terms being simplified), but none of the attempts tested particularly well. They gave me the degree anyway!

I've had a somewhat related idea. I want a way to show how a functions code gets simplified based on substituting different values for the params. So say there's a bool parameter which is used in the function in if conditions. You could set the param to false and then the tool would highlight or possible remove parts of the code that would be effected.

Interesting! Mine was purely for Lisps, which is to some extent doing it on easy mode for that sort of thing 😁