[watercooler_guy]

That’s a really neat idea, what better way to intuitively understand what a program is doing than a familiar physical environment in front of you.

Reminds me of the esolang Taxi, where you perform computation by giving directions to a taxi driver carrying “passengers” (data) around a city [1]

The city metaphor would probably create a whole new genre of software-art too, where you can optimize for beautiful layout/architecture as well as efficiency.

[1] https://bigzaphod.github.io/Taxi/

[tjchear]

This is really neat. I like your thinking that it could create a whole genre of software-art. I see it as being very plausible as I'm sure engineers worth their salt have seen poetic charm or elegance in expression of some of their codes.

It'd be great if a program's city metaphor by virtue of the rules (similar to Python's indentation rules) give rise to efficient/beautiful architectures. For example, for obvious reasons, buildings close to each other enjoy in-memory proximity and thus cache locality induced performance improvements.