These are the kinds of things that arise from mixing another interest or skill with programming. A knitter wouldn't think of doing this, and neither would a programmer, but a knitter-programmer comes up with this great idea.
Here's a video from a while back, were Vi Hart explains to the 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings how to have fun with negative-curature objects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsE2UKkIKXU
The actual pseudo-sphere he makes a model off is crocheted. I think the approach he uses would work okay with crochet, but you'd have to add in something that knows a bit about the height of a stitch (and stick with the same height stitch), and also do something where the slight tilt of crochet stitches isn't significant for your purposes.
Since all crochet stitches are just combinations of hook-through, yarn over, and draw, my idea was to make a simulator in terms of those. At one point I put together this cheat sheet breaking down the stitches: http://fstutoring.com/~chris/stuff/crochet
