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I really liked SourceTrail when it was a thing, as mentioned in the article. It's surprising that we don't have something like that for every language as a mainstream tool, to explore how bits of code relate to one another in a visual way. There are dependency graphs, e.g. in JetBrains IDEs, but none are as easy to use as SourceTrail.

You know where visual programming really excels, though? In game development and when working on other types of visualizations.

In shader graphs in particular, like in Unity, where you can very quickly iterate on how things work and look. Writing shaders manually is quite the mess, honestly, so I am really glad that alternatives like that exist, with near-immediate preview to boot: https://unity.com/features/shader-graph and https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-shader-grap...

In addition, visualizing state machines is also really nice: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StateMachineBasics.html and https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/finite-state-machines-1

Also, tools like Blender have node based logic, which is lovely too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ0qtcSymDI

Some might also mention Blueprints in Unreal, but personally I think that most of the time traditional programming languages would be a better fit there, but something more approachable than C++, for example, how some engines use C# instead, or maybe GDScript in Godot - many just use Blueprints so they don't have to write C++: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...



I love the idea of SourceTrail, and there seem to be active forks of it. Do you happen to know which one is good/trustworthy?


This appears to be the only fork that's at least somewhat active: https://github.com/OpenSourceSourceTrail/Sourcetrail

But overall, there is little activity in any of the forks, without anyone necessarily spearheading the effort: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/forks?include=a...




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