Word Clouds?
We are always on the lookout for new ways to represent source code. Word Clouds caught my fancy.
Here is one of our own source code showing the top 50 most complex functions in source tree.
We thought doing Classes by lines of code, Classes by Sum Complexity and Architectures by the same might also be interesting.
Q: Worth adding to Understand?
BTW: The Cloud was generated by Wordle.net. We wrote a script that generates output that can be pasted into its text box. I’ve attached it in case you want to try it on your own code.
File Attachment: wordart.pl.zip
October 27th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Two points:
1) Other potentially useful word cloud representations (though a number of these would probably be more useful for Trackback) would be:
- Frequently changed files
- Frequently changed “code blocks” within files
- Frequent updaters (how closely do you track *who* modifies files?)
- Most frequently included/withed
- Frequently changed methods/functions
- Most frequently impacted by changes
- Most stable, i.e. unchanged over time
- Most valuable, i.e. stable *and* widely used
2) Is there a compelling business need for this feature? Or is it just eye candy? Is the cost of development justified by the ROI?
Marc
February 17th, 2009 at 8:54 am
I could not download the File Attachment: wordart.pl (2 KB) file
http://scitools.com/blog/wordart.pl
Could you try to re-attach please.
Thanks,
Liam