The marvels of dependency graphs

Now that it's pretty clear I really am making a spreadsheet for images (something that I was telling non-technical enquirers back in December, when they asked what this project is all about), I've been thinking about the marvels of the Excel dependency viewer. Spreadsheets are usable without a dependency view, but they can save a lot of time when debugging. That's an example of hidden dependencies that I often use when teaching Cognitive Dimensions, but the Layer Language (Palimpsest - it says so on my prototype's window headers now, even if not in the tagline of this blog :-) is just starting to get complex enough that this is annoying.

So after deferring it for a couple of weeks while doing other things, I sat down in earnest today to create the dependency graph viewer. Preparations included kicking Elizabeth and Helen out (Elizabeth driven to school instead of walking with me, Helen over the mountain to do a week's shopping), and cancelling my routine weekly visit to Beryl's group in Auckland.

After the first hour of work, it was clear that this was a more difficult problem than the typical day's coding - I had to draw a diagram! Perhaps this is a measure of how programmers really regard diagrams. A necessary evil, to be resorted to only when the problem is too tangled to be dealt with by hacking code directly. In the past couple of months, I think this has happened about 3 times (the first time, we had to go out and buy some paper, because there was none in the house - I hadn't needed paper until this point, but it's notable that when it comes to thinking with diagrams, the last thing you want to do at this stage is fire up a proper drawing program).

It's just possible that these two issues are related - the problem I'm trying to solve, and the tool I need when trying to solve it. A typical "tree of trees" episode, that could easily distract an abstraction-lover into a meta-shift, with progress on the original problem greatly deferred. Hopefully, today, I can stick with my piece of paper and finish coding my dependency graph (cycles and all :-)