I love this article. Two things I'd consider highlighting:
1. Autrouting in particular is a problem well-suited to visualization and not all problems are. it's fundamentally about real things in real space (bonus: they're mostly constrained to a 2D plane, which makes them easy to visualize on a computer screen). A lot of hard and interesting problems don't match that reality and so aren't as amenable to visualization.
(... but the general advice, "look for opportunities to visualize," stands. Your eyes and brain are very fast matchers for a broad variety of patterns in a way a computer isn't without a lot of special-purpose, tuned software).
2. JavaScript, between the language itself (specifically the ability to reflect data structures at runtime) and the ecosystem around it, is very amenable to visualization. In that way specifically, it was a strong choice for this problem domain. Imagine how much work you'd be taking on if you decided to "just bang out a quick visualization" for an arbitrary piece of the algorithm in C++, or Rust.
Comments
I love this article. Two things I'd consider highlighting:
1. Autrouting in particular is a problem well-suited to visualization and not all problems are. it's fundamentally about real things in real space (bonus: they're mostly constrained to a 2D plane, which makes them easy to visualize on a computer screen). A lot of hard and interesting problems don't match that reality and so aren't as amenable to visualization.
(... but the general advice, "look for opportunities to visualize," stands. Your eyes and brain are very fast matchers for a broad variety of patterns in a way a computer isn't without a lot of special-purpose, tuned software).
2. JavaScript, between the language itself (specifically the ability to reflect data structures at runtime) and the ecosystem around it, is very amenable to visualization. In that way specifically, it was a strong choice for this problem domain. Imagine how much work you'd be taking on if you decided to "just bang out a quick visualization" for an arbitrary piece of the algorithm in C++, or Rust.