I’m pretty sure it won’t change incremental programming too much, as most people are already using some form of version control (cvs, svn, bitkeeper, etc). There’s nothing new about the concept, it’s just applying version control to the an entire filesystem.

That still means it’s wise to not change too much without testing, because even with diffs (deltas), it can be lot of work to find the cause of a bug.

Here’s a link to a Vizster approach applied to code: http://muse.com/tr3/viz.html - the first link downloads a Java jar file and then wait for the 3 meg XML before it starts up. Playing with the sliders expands out the degree of interest and clustering.

I don’t actually *develop* with this yet as an IDE. It still needs some work to be both interactive and simple. But, I’m inspired by pluggable modules, like MAX and Quartz Composer - and by patchbay GUIs like Propellerhead’s Reason.

I like the idea of experimental coding: take a piece of code, plug it in and see what happens. This is what is so appealing with the iAppaDay approach. Lots of small self contained examples to play with.

I googled Vizster and saw a cool screen with a bunch of interconnecting lines. I’d love to see code that way at times. Not all the time, maybe, but I’d love to see a breakdown of how modules/functions/objects interconnect and what their relationships are. I’m not entirely certain any of the mainstream languages expose enough meta information to build an accurate map like that. I haven’t studied it, though.

I’m not claiming my coding approach is all that efficient - but it works in the context of the languages I’m using and the style of coding I’m doing. Personally, I keep longing for something Smalltalk-ish in terms of development - but every-time I’ve tried to actually do anything using a Smalltalk, I tend to get hung up on the overly complex or ugly GUI. (*cough* Squeak… *cough*)

I’ve been playing with how Vizster may be applied to writing programs. About as different from your approach as it gets.

BTW, this is my first post, so many redundant thanks for you work!

As for the constant test-runs, I do that as well because trying to find in an error when you just added multiple changes to your code.

But either way, it’s really just to differences of programing style but hey, thanks for the nice read and outlook on things.