I just got finished implementing a tricky computer animation technique, and this morning I showed it to our research group. And I appreciated once again the gap between doing and showing.
The algorithm worked just fine, and it did all the right things in response to various data sets. But watching it working didn’t tell the real story of how it was working.
And that real story — the story of “hey folks, this is what is actually going on under the hood” — was the one I wanted to relate to the group. Which tells me I should go back and put in more graphics.
These are not graphics that an audience would ever see. Rather, they are graphics that show the cogs and wheels and pulleys that make the whole system possible. They are the visualization tools that one practitioner uses when explaining things to another practitioner.
It occurs to me that it might be possible to embed those sorts of “show what’s under the hood” tools right into the software. So whatever you implement, you can just flip a switch and get a sort of back-stage view of how everything really works.
I guess this all comes under the heading of “professional tools”.