Caterpillar

I've been talking about rendering data as more than just text. Let's imagine a function that helps us do that. Not sure what its name should be, but for the sake of this discussion, let's take inspiration from Rust and call it dbg.

This dbg function would be a no-op in production, but if a development environment is attached, it would send the data there. The editor, when displaying a function with dbg calls, would make space for the output from those, next to the code. Basically, if you opened a function, you'd automatically open a dashboard for the function at the same time.

In addition to development, you could use this mechanism for creating an ad-hoc UI for your program. Not something you'd ship to users, but for personal software? A quick simulation, maybe something you'd otherwise use a spreadsheet for; why not?