UCLA

A programming environment that visualizes a program’s execution can help users better understand their programs. However, building such an environment for programmers at large is difficult, as it is not clear how to effectively visualize large, complex programs. We would like to make progress on this problem by first focusing on a subproblem: creating a better programming experience for learning and teaching programming. To explore this approach, we built Seymour, a prototype live programming environment that visualizes all events in a program’s execution. Seymour features two complementary visualizations—one that shows a detailed view of a method call, and another that depicts the whole execution at a high level. These two visualizations come together to create a compelling user experience that we plan to test and improve with student feedback