[hoelle]

Great chat!

Talking about 1D vs 2D data structures felt incomplete without some mention of 3D coding. The only examples I know of are from games - Minecraft's Redstone or the automation genre (Satisfactory, Foundry). I imagine there are neat tools in other domains like mechanical or computer engineering, for solving problems with physical, real world materials in 3D space.

The main challenge in the 3D games is lack of x-ray vision. The frustration of blindness encourages setting up cool POV catwalks to see into your layers, which is rewarding. I assume productivity tools (or a hypothetical 3d code editor) would bring these for free.

A cool place to experiment might be .vox, the voxel modeling format. MagicaVoxel is a pretty fun editor, and I've daydreamed about imbuing blocks with behavior ala Redstone.

I don't think it would be super productive, but it might be fun and satisfying.