Everytime I meet up with Alexandre Bergel at a Smalltalk conference, we talk about Mondrian. And I always ask him a question: "Why is it that every time I see Mondrian, it's always about Rectangles?" In some ways, it's appropriate that Mondrian is always about rectangles. Google Mondrian, and the first images you'll see are all about rectangles. Nearly all of the artwork associated with Piet Mondrian is a love affair with rectangles.
Anyway, I thought it was time to put up or shut up. I want a new question to bug Alexandre about when we cross paths in the future. So I decided to play a little. I wasn't interested in rewriting all that Mondrian is. I just wanted to experiment a little with other polyshapes to express multiple simultaneous attributes of subjects I was trying to visualize. Mostly, I was interested in playing with MeshGradients using Cairo, because I was curious if I could find an interesting problem I could use mesh gradients with.
If you google Cubism, you'll see the artwork that I was inspired by. According to Wikipedia
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
That sounded exactly like what I was trying to do. I published my couple-day-prototype in the Open Repository in a package called TAG-Cubist. I realized in playing with this how it's not just about rectangles (of course), but how important layout of the per-subject-graphics is. I didn't do anything, other than present then in a tiled format. I'll leave that kind of thing to others. Here are screencaptures of the four example methods I put on the Portfolio class (a Portfolio is a collection of similar drawings for a group of different subjects).
Some of the methods found in the Portfolio object, showing clockwise, from noon high position: LoC, inst var ref count, selector size, argument count, and bytecodes.
Some of the top-level packages found in my image, showing clockwise, from noon high position: prerequisites, defined classes, extended classes.
Classes found in the ArithmeticValue class hierarchy, showing clockwise, from noon high position: methods, inst vars, refs to globals, global refs to the class (attributes suggested by Bob Hartwig, thanks!).
Top-level bundles in my image, showing clockwise, from noon high position: child packages, child bundles, prerequisites, comment size, defined classes, methods of defined classes, extended classes, extension methods.
If I was to go on playing, I'd basically start to reinvent Mondrian. Which is not something I really wanted to do. I might play with the way the shape is generated some more, make it more of a star graph (whereas it's a sort of spider plot right now). And I'd definitely figure out how to do a legend plot.
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