[erlang-questions] Tools was The quest for the perfect programming language for massive concurrency.

[Zachary Kessin]

On 2/3/14, 5:15 PM, Vance Shipley wrote:
> I do a lot of work with communicating finite state machines.  I like
> to see these as state diagrams.  Message sequence charts (MSC) are another
> viewpoint we use a lot.  I have over the years developed some techniques
> to generate these graphical representations from my own Erlang programs.
> In 2001 I experimented with parsing my modules into Abstract Forms and
> wrote a program which found the state transitions in gen_fsm behaviours.
> It output Graphviz DOT files which could then be viewed and manipulated
> in other tools.  OTP ships with the 'et' tool which can create MSCs from
> executing programs.  The 'observer' presents supervision trees on a
> running system as a directed graph.  These are all actual graphical tools
> which I find add to my understanding of my work in significant ways.
>
Well this does bring up a good point, if there are tools like this that 
would be helpful then lets
talk about what types of tools people might find useful and how to 
create them.

I like the idea of a tool that can take a gen_fsm and generate a visual 
diagram of the states and the transforms. Maybe
even do something like the Webmachine debugger where you could have 
something that would plot how a FSM moves threw its
states to understand what is going on.

Erlang has some great tools, but that is no reason why we can't have more

-- 
Zachary Kessin
Mostly Erlang Podcast <http://mostlyerlang.com>
Skype: zachkessin
Twitter: @zkessin <http://twitter.com/zkessin>
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