Losing the ease of dataflow programming

[auspex]

Please don't read anything I've written as opposition to AF. I love it, but I'm worried about the next guy. As someone said, "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

Nonetheless, it seems like there should be a better way to represent and work with actors. Maybe a graph of actor vertices and message edges which expands, contracts, and highlights to show different functions. Maybe just UML sequences.

[cbutcher]

I've found that drawing out a graph-like page showing my collection of actors from a 'caller' -> 'nested actor' point of view is helpful. You can display the class hierarchy within LabVIEW, and this can also be important, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with who talks to who (indeed, I'd guess it infrequently covers any of the messaging paths)...

Perhaps a function showing the current layout of your root/nested actors within a project starting from some VI would be useful, but I'm sure it would be a nightmare to try and code - actors in case statements seem like an obvious sticking point for simple visualization.