Keeping code on one screen passe?

[JÞB]

As well, Virtually all my BD fit on a standard Win 7 resolution 1920x1200 (Since View cluster as Icon became available!) .  Provisos-  My task bar is 4-5 rows high to accomidate a whole lotta panels. I leave 3 Columns of Icons uncovered on the desktop.  Screen 2 is not for VI's NO NO NO (projects, Sequence Editor, Software Requirements all fit nicely over there) 

Is 1920x1200 larger than recommended? The VI analizer default says so.  What are we talking about here though? What is the reason for the Style recommendation?  Can the code be read, understood and maintained right?  Well documented code and some attention to wiring slinging fundamentals like direction of flow, logical layout of conpanes, MEANINGFUL icons and good naming conventions go a lot farther towards making your code better than cramming a BD into a messy un-commented 600x400 panel full of stacked sequences with dozens of sequence locals.  And yet- "Block Diagram Too Big" gets all the bad press in the review-  Maybe because its just so easy to identify and "suggest" a solution for (Make This chunk a sub-vi for no reason.) 

Sloppy thinking makes sloppy code- the WHY is so much more important than size.

That being said- if you are considering hitting Ctrl+Shift+N- your code isn't readable

[Ben]

Good post Jeff.

This drives at a philosophical question in my minds eye.

As engineers and scientist we look to hard numbers to do evaluations (like the VI ANalyzer and its size limit) on a topic of STYLE !

I spent some time working at a company named Filmet (we won Photo finisher of the year back in the day when Photoshop was rare and memory cost a fortune) and was exposed (intended pun) to a shop full of artist. I learned a bit about how the human mind wants information presented in grpahical form. WHen you get a chance to look at some classic artwork you will find a standard pattern in many of them. The pattern of which I write is one that leads the observers eye from bottom left to top right.

See here for example.

(I thought pointallism was appropriate for computer program talk

The same "bottom left to top right" pattern can be seen in this sub-VI (just one I had handy).

and here is a sub-VI that will not fit on one screen.

Again the eye moves toward the top right corner.

But that is just one pattern that applies to "drawing" a diagram.

It is also said that we "WRITE" code. When we hoping we passed that "Creative Writting" Course so we can get onto to the Calc 3 we really wanted to take, the proffessors were probablly teaching us how to construct our writtings so that that reader "walk along the path into the house"  or "describe the scene as we scanned our head" etc. A bunch of disogranized facts were hard to follow and remeber.

So if our diagrams "show" the work buy their form and layout we are commuicating to ourselves and to those that follow us in the code, what we are trying to do.

In my shop I pass all of the developers cubes on the way to mine. I can with a glance tell what my co-workers are working on.

So there is yet another way of evaluating diagram "style", "Can you guess what VI does from ten feet away?"

But all of my points made above are difficult to evaluate numericly.

Spoiler

(Well that is one blog article wasted )

Ben

[smercurio_fc]

Ben, I hate to be the one to say this, but some of still live/work (the latter in my case) in internet brown holes, where all we can get are poky low-end DSL connections. That image took FOREVER to load.

It's still a gorgeous painting. Saw the one in the Chicago Art Museum. Wow.

[Ben]

Sorry Saverio!

I guess there is a limit to how many points a single post can have.

I notified the moderator to edit with a low res version or whatever.

Ben

[JÞB]

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@Ben wrote:

Sorry Saverio!

I guess there is a limit to how many points a single post can have.

I notified the moderator to edit with a low res version or whatever.

Ben

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Just wondering how long that picture took to dial?

[altenbach]

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@smercurio_fc wrote:

Ben, I hate to be the one to say this, but some of still live/work (the latter in my case) in internet brown holes, where all we can get are poky low-end DSL connections. That image took FOREVER to load.

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Oh man, good thing I looked at this thread at home. Loading that via my cell phone during the commute would have been a serious mistake!

Almost 9MB is my data allowance for more than one day and my ancient phone would also have had problems rendenring it at all. 😞 😮

(Now it is about 200k. Ahh, much better!)

[Andrey_Dmitriev]

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@Ben wrote:

 ...

and here is a sub-VI that will not fit on one screen.

... 

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Nice way to merge errors:

Thanks, Ben.

[Andrey_Dmitriev]

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@Norbert_B wrote:

...

Developer tend to forget that screen resolution is not equal on all machines. ...

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Oh, that's true. Right now I have 2560x1600 pixels screen, and its quite easy to keep my code fitted into single screen , but it could be terrible for other, so I put two PostIt stickers on the monitor's border somewhere around resolution 1600x1200...

[Ben]

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@Andrey Dmitriev wrote:

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@Ben wrote:

 ...

and here is a sub-VI that will not fit on one screen.

... 

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Nice way to merge errors:

Thanks, Ben.

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You are very welcome Andrey.

This is one of the few times I can invite people to use the code I use in my applications. The top of those two sub-VIs is called "Error Fork Stacker" and was posted by Mike Porter in this thread. If you do use that function, I humbly encourage you to drop a Kuods on his post and maybe a tag or two to thank him for that very helpful piece of code.

It is superior to the normal merge errors in that it preserves multiple error message. If there are errors coming in on both legs the bottom error get packed inside the "source" of the other error code. Sure decoding multiple errors can get tedious but I would rather have the information and choose to ignore it than to not have the info.

Now on the other hand, I can not share the bottom of those two (called "Up Stacker") since it is part of the Event Loging Suite we use in our applications. But I bet you can figure out what is in it. 

Ben

[LV_Pro]

Thought it looked like Mike's work, recognized the color scheme, one I first saw in 1997 when he and I started working together. He has been a big "error cluster/handling evangelist" since I've known him. He and I shared an apartment in those days, learned A LOT of LabVIEW from him.