Programming should be visual

Programming is actually rather simple.

It’s just a bunch of functions manipulating data.

But it feels extremely complex in practice.

A lot of time is spent figuring out how to organize code. Naming and grouping.

Repositories, folders, files, packages, functions, data structures.

Inside each function there are many different ways to manipulate data. Each programming language with many different ways to achieve the same thing.

But what is the right way?

There are many different opinions of what makes so-called “clean code”.

But I can’t help but think that with every new language, library, or framework, that we are missing something obvious.

The code we write only exists to be understood by humans. Our colleagues and our future selves.

Something peculiar is that the way we explain our code to each other is often via diagrams on whiteboards. Boxes and lines to indicate data flowing between different parts of a system.

It’s visual.

But then we write code and it’s just text. And when we read code, we are building up these diagrams in our minds each time. When we are debugging, be it inspecting variables, or reading log statements, we are again just constructing these mental images.

Now imagine if for every line of code that was written, we visualized it at the same time. The data structures, the control flow, the algorithms, the data flow.

And so the answer to the question of how to organize code simply becomes: such that it is easily understood visually.

It’s no coincidence that almost every part of computer science when taught involves diagrams. Think back to slides from computer science lectures. Databases, operating systems, data structures and algorithms, web servers. All these concepts are best understood visually.

I think if we have the right tools to allow us to visualize our code as we write it, complexity will become apparent visually, and simple and clean code will be obvious to see.