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λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

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Re: λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

#52

This guy is such a genius. I'm continuously blown away by his stuff. His work just keeps getting better and better. It's mind-boggling. He's also the author of all this stuff on GitHub which is incredible: https://github.com/LingDong- His work is timeless. to me it has this sort of timeless quality to it: people will look at it in like a hundred years or 400 years and be like yeah this person was a genius, they were…

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Re: λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

#53
I haven't understood the details of this language yet, but on first look isn't it a... circuit board designer?

There are already games that allows you to place electric components, each as a pixel on a screen, where these pixels are powerful enough to allow you to code arbitrary programs. I particularly like The Powder Toy, with enough components to make a fast calculator: https://powdertoy.co.uk/Browse/View.html?ID=1214884

The author arK created some of the most powerful electronic-based saves in The Powder Toy. He also made a SNAKE game which you should definitely check out. They are impressive.

Redstone in Minecraft should also fit into this category, but the world is too big, components are less powerful and game tick is slow, so writing programs in it is too clumsy.

Re: λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

#54

This is very cool. I've always been very disappointed that programming is so utterly dominated by the linear text format. It feels like so much potential for expression and feedback is getting left on the table, making use of our capacity to understand and work with spatialisation, patterns, sounds, colours, dynamics, etc would make a lot of sense. Bret Victor's The Future of Programming and other talks come to mind…

As a thought experiment, the analogous argument could be made about the linearity of the HN comment threads (despite their tree structure, similar to programming languages). However somehow I doubt that adding spatialization, patterns, sounds, colors, dynamics would be turn out to be an overall improvement.

Re: λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

#55

This guy is such a genius. I'm continuously blown away by his stuff. His work just keeps getting better and better. It's mind-boggling. He's also the author of all this stuff on GitHub which is incredible: https://github.com/LingDong- His work is timeless. to me it has this sort of timeless quality to it: people will look at it in like a hundred years or 400 years and be like yeah this person was a genius, they were…

I saw this post come through on Reddit yesterday and spent some time going through his projects. I have the same response as you. His stuff is very inspiring and wants me to lean more heavily into my whims and ideas. What I really, really enjoy about his projects is the culture embodied in them.

Re: λ-2D: An exploration of drawing as programming language

#56
There is a lot of interesting work related to computation using shapes in the Shape Grammar[0] field. With shape grammars, rather than using computer vision to parse the pixels, computation can be done using the intrinsic properties of shapes. There is some great work being done at Georgia Tech in Dr. Economou's Shape Computation Lab[1]. For beginners, they have created an unsigned binary adder using purely shape representations as numbers[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_grammar

[1] https://shape.design.gatech.edu/index.html

[2] https://shape.design.gatech.edu/Machine/Projects/12_Circuits...

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