A few years ago, I wrote an esoteric, minimalistic turtle graphics language called CFRS[]: <https://susam.net/cfrs.html>.
This was an exercise in making a turtle graphics language that is as minimal as possible. It is closer to Brainfsck than JavaScript and it is not Turing complete, by design.
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
It's a weird feeling. I'm starting to loathe the very art I used to admire and spend lot of hours to create. It's like the Gulliver story where people were fed with lots of tasty food, by the monster.
This is what "computer art" and "generative art" meant for decades: relatively short programs generating interesting pictures. Today's text-to-image models are quite different from that.
(But I think even for diffusion models, interesting pictures that come from very short or unspecific prompts are more in the spirit of classic generative art, as they don't try to describe specific details explicitly.)
(and yes, the full name (3-Dimension Model Turtle) does have the same number of syllables as a certain for letter franchise staring beings named for a certain quartet named after Italian Renaissance artists)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] threadThis was an exercise in making a turtle graphics language that is as minimal as possible. It is closer to Brainfsck than JavaScript and it is not Turing complete, by design.
To see some demos, go to <https://susam.github.io/cfrs/demo.html>.
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
[0] https://www.terrapinlogo.com/
Not clear nor simple. Imo negligible use for teaching. If you know how to import modules and use library functions then you don't need LOGO anymore...
'KEYWORD(50)'
is always simpler than:
' turtle.function(value, value)'
Great project but missed the opportunity to develop your own LOGO interpreter from scratch in web assembly:)
If you want to create much fancier graphics (and games!) in actual Logo, check out turtleSpaces:
https://turtlespaces.org
Where you get 140 characters to draw using code. (Similar as in the resulting pictures reminded me of dwitter)
(But I think even for diffusion models, interesting pictures that come from very short or unspecific prompts are more in the spirit of classic generative art, as they don't try to describe specific details explicitly.)
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/tdmt.py
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/threeDmo...
(and yes, the full name (3-Dimension Model Turtle) does have the same number of syllables as a certain for letter franchise staring beings named for a certain quartet named after Italian Renaissance artists)