The document discusses software visualization and the challenges of bridging the cognitive and conceptual gaps between software and its visual representations. It provides examples of software visualization tools and argues that visualizations alone are not enough, as they sit across a cognitive divide and can be isolated, unintuitive, and overloaded. To overcome these gaps, metaphors must be used, but adoption of metaphors is challenging without wide acceptance. Closing both the cognitive and conceptual gaps will require convincing people of visualization's benefits and relying on future generations familiar with visual approaches.

1. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder Michele Lanza - University of Lugano

4. Visual Programming? UML? The description of a thing should not be more complex than the thing itself

5. Static Visualization ArgoUML, System Complexity View

6. Dynamic Visualization CodeCrawler, instance collaboration view

7. Back 2 Reality Is Programming [advanced] text editing?

9. Example I - Dr. Scheme visualization of code

10. Example II - Eclipse Creole plugin

11. The Cognitive Overload Problem correlating evolution & bugs of mozilla

14. Visualization about Software Fractal Figures

15. Visualization of Software The Class Blueprint

16. Useful?

17. Human vs. Machine The two gaps are related the programming language you use influences your thinking Languages come with too much overhead and thus they obscure the actual thing: modeling problems modeling solutions communicating this to the computer

18. Metaphors When you provide visualizations about software the only way to overcome the cognitive gap is to use metaphors This only works if there is a wide adoption [such as design patterns]

19. convoluted languages [like java, C++, etc.] widen the conceptual gap Reflections

21. Future work close the cognitive gap close the conceptual gap convince people work hard count on the next generation