I think those examples are a bit misleading in that nobody actually prints 100,000 lines of code and looks at them all at once. So those examples are showing probably the whole "program" at once, which is impressive and looks daunting, same as a big textual code base.
Rather, in order to understand a certain aspect of the system, I imagine picking just one of the nodes and then asking the IDE to show me, say, the immediate inputs. Some of these may be semi-hidden (code folding!), others may show more detail, etc.
BTW, I've been thinking it would be great if these systems had a textual representation in the vein of Graphviz' dot language. So one could have the best of both worlds. For diffing, a simple textual diff could do, but one could come up fancier semantic diffs in the same vein semantic diffs for code or XML exist.
Rather, in order to understand a certain aspect of the system, I imagine picking just one of the nodes and then asking the IDE to show me, say, the immediate inputs. Some of these may be semi-hidden (code folding!), others may show more detail, etc.
BTW, I've been thinking it would be great if these systems had a textual representation in the vein of Graphviz' dot language. So one could have the best of both worlds. For diffing, a simple textual diff could do, but one could come up fancier semantic diffs in the same vein semantic diffs for code or XML exist.