I now have an interactive version of my Expressiveness Benchmark on a live URL. You can see the programs yourself, and check out my quantitative analysis comparing different languages. Here’s a screenshot of the task view that highlights how each language implements a specific sub-task. H/t to @Sietse Brouwer for helping me with R programs.
Thing I really like
- This small multiples layout + coloring enables a kind of cross-language comparison I didn't know I was missing
- Using dedicated glyphs for extremum in the performance plot (also yay vega!)
2 greedy ideas that are definitely scope creep
- Having the ability to enlarge what's in one of the cells by hovering over it - lets me inspect cells without being so committed as to click a whole column - this is a feature of some "image gallery" style sites
- Enabling users to go straight from example to runnable example: cheapest way to do this might be to programmatically generate an array of http://repl.it embeds
Question:
- What does the background color represent? At one point I thought it might mean "same concept expressed in different ways across different languages", but I wasn't sure (e.g. how you express a "filter" condition might be marked the same way across all the columns).
Ah, I see the color coding explanation in the screenshot you posted, I missed it because I was only selecting columns and not rows. I see the color coding explanation appears if you select a row. Maybe one way to make this discoverable to people who are skimming too quickly could be to make mousing over either of the "click" directions highlight the cell in the table where you should go click? Anyways, this is really neat, thanks for sharing this work!
Thanks Cameron Yick. Those are great ideas. I’ll try to make the interactions more discoverable.
Re layout, this was my instinctive reaction reading through Rosetta code, 7guis, and TodoMVC. Seems like a little legwork to see code side by side goes a long way.