A human tutor can take pauses when something isn't clear, but a visualizer is forced to choose between checking for the user's understanding and not interrupting the flow.
Link on BFS and Topological Sorting for instance:
Most of the time, what you want is not a clever visualization of a complex algorithm, but a simple distillation of its essence. Static diagrams are usually simpler than visualizations. And if you feel the inherent complexity can only be conveyed with animation, it's likely you haven't fully distilled your understanding.
But even in that example, while the animation instantly conveys the high-level idea, it's still a bit magical: "I get what's happening, but not exactly how." To understand in detail what's going on, carefully chosen freeze frames with an explanation would probably be better, especially complemented by the animation. The ability to slow down, reverse, and interact could work too here.
I built something similar while learning for my algorithms course ate university. [0]
It not fully polished yet and not algorithms I had planned to implement are done yet. But I learned a lot doing it and some algorithms like "rotating calippers" or delaunay triangulation are really fun to watch.
Usage: click the canvas to create nodes, drag from their border to connect them. Click the "algorithms" tab on the top and select an algorithm to run in the right sidebar. The use the slider to step through the result.
https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer
When debugging JS, there is a nice way to provide visualizations for application specific objects without touching the application code.
Combined with time travel debugging which allows to step backwards, it is really easy to understand complex algorithms:
https://github.com/hediet/vscode-delorean-js-debug
The visualization library is independent and open source. There is also a rust cli and a web playground. I'm very open for contributions! (especially new visualizations)
Maybe you already know this as background work for your plugins, but Symantec C++ was one of the first IDEs to provide this kind of tooling.
I had quite some envy not having similar feature on Borland compilers.
Data Structure Visualizations (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082943 - Feb 2019 (33 comments)
Data Structure Visualizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480517 - Oct 2017 (9 comments)
Animated Data Structures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15306593 - Sept 2017 (1 comment)
Data Structure Visualizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064865 - April 2017 (2 comments)
Data Structure Visualizations (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10183811 - Sept 2015 (3 comments)
Data Structure Visualizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6928904 - Dec 2013 (35 comments)
Data Structure Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505862 - May 2011 (7 comments)
