This is a great resource by Daniel Shiffman. For those who don't know, The Nature of Code was a kickstarter project[0] (he also wrote "Learning Processing" a while ago), and I've contributed to it for the following reason: I've been around people in the arts field a lot, and when it comes to teaching them programming from scratch, nothing beats processing. I'm a huge fan of other languages for my day-to-day use, but for teaching people who have never seen code before, processing is fantastic. (it might not be a coincidence that Daniel works in a Fine Arts department)
There's incredible power in being able to immediately visualize any data structure with such ease. You only need to understand that there's a "setup" function, and a "run-all-the-time-while-this-window-is-open" function (draw), and tell people to jam whatever code they want in there, it will be executed from top to bottom. The result? Usually, incredibly messy code with gigantic nested loops everywhere - but students were invariably learning things, and once in a while, having fun too. Books like these are really important because they give learners a starting point, something to mess around with - which is usually all they need to get started.
Wonderful book! On L-systems: The Sierpinski triangle is used in fractal antennas which dramatically improve signal strength. There is a program called Terragen which procedurally generates entire planets with atmosphere and vegetation, in 1:1 scale. https://vimeo.com/3611863
16 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 50.0 ms ] threadThere's incredible power in being able to immediately visualize any data structure with such ease. You only need to understand that there's a "setup" function, and a "run-all-the-time-while-this-window-is-open" function (draw), and tell people to jam whatever code they want in there, it will be executed from top to bottom. The result? Usually, incredibly messy code with gigantic nested loops everywhere - but students were invariably learning things, and once in a while, having fun too. Books like these are really important because they give learners a starting point, something to mess around with - which is usually all they need to get started.
This looks great, I'll be going through it soon.
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shiffman/the-nature-of-...
It has the most accessible descriptions of vector fields, genetic algorithms, neural networks (etc) that I've seen anywhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5153895
http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm
Dumb fucken nigger. What does a government random number site produce? Random fucken number, stupid fucken nigger.
Take number modulo (remainder) 100,000 for line number in Bible.
Fucken stupid fucken nigger.
You can verify my numbers by going to NIST and getting the number for that minute in question. Unix timestamp for the minute.
Stupid fucken nigger.