Recursive Drawing • Hacker News Board

Re: Recursive Drawing

#21

Post by jacktoole1 » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:22 AM UTC

mrmaddog wrote: post #19

This is really cool, and playing with it made me smile. I wish it had two things: 1) A way to delete objects that you placed by accident. (perhaps there is a way to do this which I couldn't find). I keep going back a page and losing everything because I press the delete button. 2) A way to label layers, with generated descriptions of what the layer is. i.e. Here is a new layer called a "heart". A heart is two circles…

Right click on the shape, and you can choose to delete it.

Re: Recursive Drawing

#22

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:27 AM UTC

eck wrote: post #9

Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description language.)

It's not even really that archaic- concatenative languages just never hit mainstream among programmers. PostScript has built-in datatypes for dictionaries and lists, first-class procedures, closure-like mechanisms, clean, uniform syntax... refreshingly modern for something designed in 1982. I wrote a Forth compiler and VM in PostScript a while back: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps

Re: Recursive Drawing

#23

Post by rdsoze » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:31 AM UTC

wow .. pretty awesome :) is it possible to download the drawings ?

Re: Recursive Drawing

#24

Post by jedahan » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:32 AM UTC

Do yourself a favor, and watch Toby Schachman (the author) explaining his ITP thesis. This is just one expression of a larger vision for alternative programming which he describes very succinctly. These two videos include him and the slides: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2012_archives/thesis-Heching... http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2012_archives/thesis-Heching...

More angles and other great videos available at http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2012/archives/

Re: Recursive Drawing

#25

Post by conductr » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:36 AM UTC

This is quite clever and interesting. props

Re: Recursive Drawing

#26

Post by stephenhandley » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:42 AM UTC

this is awesome. support for deltas on transparency and colors would be really cool. also snapshot to save and share a picture

Re: Recursive Drawing

#27

Post by guelo » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:45 AM UTC

Kopion wrote: post #14

Does anybody have any insights into how this was developed? Does the author care to chime in?

ctrl-u is your friend. Libraries used include jquery and knockout.js. The meat of the app seems to be here http://recursivedrawing.com/compiled/app.js

Re: Recursive Drawing

#28

Post by rdsoze » Thu, May 10, 2012, 2:49 AM UTC

a few clicks, drags and I got this !! http://yfrog.com/z/oe7eoickj

Re: Recursive Drawing

#29

Post by nreece » Thu, May 10, 2012, 3:00 AM UTC

Poster here. Disclaimer: I didn't build this.

Re: Recursive Drawing

#30

Post by kjhughes » Thu, May 10, 2012, 3:05 AM UTC

kika wrote: post #18

eck wrote: post #9

Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description language.)

PS is basically Forth

Fair casual observation. More here on the relationship between Forth and Postscript: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthPostscriptRelationship