Software visualization

the long version

In the past decade, high-quality interfaces have become standard in a growing number of areas such as games and CD-ROM-based encyclopedias. Yet the overwhelming majority of programmers edit their code using a single font within a single window and view code execution via the hand insertion of print statements. Software Visualization (SV) redresses this imbalance by using typography, graphics, and animation techniques to show program code, data, and control flow. This book describes the history of SV, techniques and frameworks for its construction, its use in education and program debugging, and recent attempts to evaluate its effectiveness. In making programming a multimedia experience, SV leaves programmers and computer science researchers free to explore more interesting issues and to tackle more challenging problems.