Thread by @girba

A case study of #MoldableDevelopment:

A while back we implemented the squarified treemap algorithm in #GToolkit.

The implementation is based on a paper written by Bruls, @mackees and van Wijk in 2000 that describes a heuristics-based algorithm.

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The paper describes the algorithm in detail, and most of the explanations are based on visual depictions.

Here is a visualization showing the core iterative steps taken by the algorithm.

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Of course, the main goal of implementing an algorithm like this is to produce the final picture. Here is how such a result looks like in #GToolkit.

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But our goal is not only to produce a functional system. We want an explainable system. The rule of thumb is that if a human deems a representation as meaningful, it should be the responsibility of the system to carry it forward.

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In our case, when we inspect the algorithm, we want to see the picture showing the steps as in the paper!

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Once the algorithm object knows how to present itself, we document the code through examples that give us interesting algorithm objects.

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And once we have examples, we can quickle write a narrative.

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1213702556603600896?s=20&t=W-HI7wCbHAzM0BxRq0QxJA

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