I just (finally) figured out how to represent my coding language as a directed multi-graph with labeled edges. Now I'm wondering if the interpretation steps could be represented as graph translations, so you could literally "watch" it execute. Anyone have any ideas for libraries that I could use to explore that idea, or examples I could look to? My current best guess is NetworkX and visdcc+dash.

I swear I read articles from more people than just Stephen Wolfram, but he just happened to publish a good one for this: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/expression-evaluation-and-fundamental-physics/ It won’t help you explore the idea outside his environment, but the article presents a few different ways of conceptualizing and visualizing trees of expression evaluation.

An example of what I'm talking about, done in graphviz as a prototype. Ugly, but promising.

Oh! Have you heard of interaction nets?

I have now?

Oh! So they're these really cool methods of modeling computation, that use graphs as the computer itself! https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/interaction_nets.html