I've beeen thinking about this for a while and I think you guys should definitely look into it.

I'm a newbie and one of the hardest parts of programming for me was trying to wrap my mind around the structure of how a program worked and the way computers process data.   It helped a lot more once I began charting out the flow of a program with mindmapping software, but I feel like the tools are made for people who are what I call "symbolicists" good at symbols,  where as I am good at pure visualization.

Converting functions to geometric objects and having a structural geometic layout of a program that can be rendered  to 2D or 3D would be great.  My idea is kinda hard to explain without pictures.  But to get an idea you can check out www.thebrain.com, download PersonaBrain nd fiddle around with the object creation and mapping.

I'd love to have an environment like PersonalBrain but rendered in 3D where people can create 'objects' and simply link them like that.  I feel programming is being held back a lot by the traditional mathematicians and symbolicists.  I mean imagine engineering a program using actual virtual 3D structures, etc... it would be wonderful, plus the ability to follow the data through rendering an animation of the data and flagging that you want to track in certain colors, etc.   If you want to speak to me about this further I'll post my email.  I've got some amazing ideas, now I just need someone with the math background to implement them.  I'm sure if I had more background in programming and math I'd be able to do all this myself.

PhiLho  wrote on Jun 16^th, 2008, 1:58pm:


I'm more interested in keeping combining the text aspect of programming languages (i.e. quickly able to define or write functions) with the ability to break them into units and have multiple people work on them at once within a virtual  2D / 3D space.   This idea has been sitting in my mind for a while, I've used some really bad 'visual programming' languages the truth is many start from the wrong angle. Since it's about making better programs overall and you can only do that by understanding functionality,  i.e. showing people how the flow of code and functions are organized within a visual space.

It would cut down enormously on bug tracking and bad design decisions, and being able to see something 'at a glance'.

I'll check it out anyway though thanks