Data Structure Visualizations

I dream of a world where this is built in everywhere that I write expressions. It's so hard, and we desperately need it. Bret Victor has called a lot of attention to this lately, and rightly so. It's easy to forget how much we have to remember inside our heads just to work with code. And why? Much of this work could and should be done by the machine, which would free us to focus on what we want. But…

I worked on algorithm visualizers in the past and found the effort necessary to get something better than static pictures and text to be immense. Every single combination of data structure and algorithm needs to have a semi-custom designed visualizer in order for it to be easier to understand and appealing. A human tutor can take pauses when something isn't clear, but a visualizer is forced to choose between checking for the user's understanding and not interrupting the flow. Link…

I was a bit annoyed that the visualizations require you to enter a number, then press a button, which triggers the input field to clear and disables input until the current animation is done. So if you wanna see a quick progression of building a linked list, you have to click, type, press button, repeat. It'd be neat if they queued up comma separated inputs so you could actually watch an entire sequence unfold.

Quite interesting. When playing with the B+ tree, I added about 30 values, including the same value about 3-4 times. Apparently, you cannot delete the last of those repeating values. Seems to be a bug. No wonder the B+ trees are considered as one of the most complex of widely used data structures.