Visual / artistic representations of code

Question

I don't know if there is a name for this. What I am interested in is what sort of graphical programs there are for representing code or code development in a high level, abstract and beautiful way.

The only example I know of something like this is a video I saw a while ago which used glowing orbs moving around a repository to show user code activity around a large open source project- although I can't find it again.

I'm sorry if this question is too vague. I was just thinking last night about how you could show a project skeleton to somebody as a picture and whether you could do it in such a way that they could identify the general shape and/or tidyness of the codebase at a glance. If you could watch a project grow, what would it look like? What are the problems, if any, with writing a parser to accomplish this?

I'm looking for something more abstract than UML diagrams!

Answer 1

Check out visual complexity.

Answer 2

Maybe you could try doxygen. It's basically a source code documentation generator but gives a good visual connections between classes, here is an example