Registered user since Mon 14 Dec 2020
PhD student in computer science (PL/SE) at EPFL. Research interest: automatic diagramming to enrich our interfaces with programs and proofs. Follow me on Mastodon @shardulc@types.pl.
Diagrams are often compositional and structurally regular, just like the objects they represent, be it data structures, proof terms, algebraic objects, execution traces, or so on. Diagrams can compute and be computed with. Diagrams evolve systematically with steps of reasoning or execution. But our diagramming tools today don’t take advantage of any of this—we draw diagrams individually and ad hoc, letting go of the conceptual diagram the moment we have its concrete rendering. How might we instead specify a schema of diagrams, whose instances can be automatically created from the objects being represented? How might we treat diagrams as evolving computational objects separate from their renderings? How might we codify æsthetic preferences to make automatic diagrams also automatically pretty?
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