Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

Hey guys, I've been working on this Clojure project for a while now, honestly I'm not even entirely sure what it is, a game? a game engine? a 3d editor? a visual programming language? Anyway, it's a system to create mechanical contraptions and interact with them. I built a few test machines and you can see them in the first video I posted on my channel [1]. For instance you can create a fully functional piano in 5 minutes and play it, the keys move, it plays the sounds as you would expect. And this system turned out surprisingly powerful, to build these machines it often does not require any coding which was kind of surprising. I created this tetris game in half an hour [2]. It's not perfect but it is functional and again it required only a tiny snippet of code to coordinate the different submachines and even that might be unnecessary. The "programs" i.e. the machines created also interact in a way that you usually only see with command line programs. You can create a machine then someone else can use that machine as a part for a more powerful machine, for instance that lever that turns the tetris game on and off doesn't "come standard" with the system, I build it separately then imported it. Using the program is a lot like programming, thinking logically, coming up with solutions to problems, fixing bugs, but it's entirely visual so you can use your physical intuition to figure things out, maybe that's why it's possible to do things so fast. Anyway I was hoping some of you would give it a try and give me some feedback. I need people to see what they can build with it, I don't even know what's possible at this point. And if you want to give it a go and get stuck, feel free to contact me with any questions.

[1] MockMechanics Introduction Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrwxbQj5mj0&t=193s

[2] Tetris Machine Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPm1xxQ-qY

[3] https://mockmechanics.com/

That's pretty cool! It seems like a weird mixture of physical contraptions (lego/meccano etc) or minecraft redstone circuits, and something you'd see in Media Molecules' Dreams (especially the graph-motion).

I just watched the Tetris video and it reminded me of this mechanical pong game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBoe3yM9IKs

What inspired you to create this?

Thanks!

It's interesting you'd mention that, because most of the program is "mechanical", you manipulate things in 3d, but for some things you have to go into a window and connect a few 2d nodes like the gates in motherboard mode. I was thinking maybe I should use 3d manipulation for everything, maybe the video you posted could serve as inspiration for 3d gates.

This is so cool. It would be great to use this as a teaching tool so students can visualize things. Keep at it man.