Programming

Evolution has a weird obsession with crabs. At least five separate times, nature has taken some random crustacean and said “you know what would work better? A crab.” But it’s not just crabs - evolution keeps reinventing the same solutions everywhere. Trees evolved independently more than 40 times. Eyes appeared in dozens of unrelated lineages, with vastly different abilities. Flight emerged in insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats, each indipendently. These aren’t coincidences. They’re proof that good design is inevitable. ...

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a great place to scale down ideas and quickly finish demos and prototypes. This week I’m toying with generative art ideas, starting with a tool that stamps the screen in various patterns. I’m hoping to evolve these prototypes into a general plotter library, but for now I’m focused on making things that look cool, as a way to play in generative code again. ...

I’ve been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn’t my favourite language, but it’s fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s. First tests I started with a Minecraft style terrain generator, but as 2D tyles: ...

2017 was a good year for JavaScript. The newer language features are now part of our daily routine. Tightly integrated CI and packaging scripts are the norm, and we have a huge sea of libraries and tools available to us. The core JavaScript frameworks have settled down and matured to the point that we can be confident in JS as the base for large-scale commercial projects. Here are a few of the main JavaScript things that impressed me this year: ...

PHP is a great language. It follows a long lineage of C-based syntaxes, mirroring much of the C standard library. It performs well, is trivial to deploy, and has been stable for many years. And, it’s almost universally hated. While many people look down on PHP, it’s worth considering where it shines compared to other languages. I find that in many uses, PHP provides a great set of features and elegance. Not only is it competent, but there are places where it is truly a great little tool. ...

One of my favourite JavaScript features is its literal object notation. It allows you to declare data structures in JSON, which is a very succinct, C-like syntax. You can use this notation to declare SETs, and the a in b syntax to verify a variable is in a set: /* Declare your set as a JSON constant */ var valid_widgets = { 'widget-viewer': 1, 'special-viewer': 1, 'widget-editor': 1 }; /* Fail if something isn't in the set */ if ( ! (options.widget in valid_widgets) ) return false; /* Profit! */ As the in keyword operates on the index of the referred object, we set the value of the constants to 1 (true). A bit of a hack, but it results in a very clean way of checking if something is part of a set of valid values. ...

Boost’s Filesystem library is an incredible resource: it abstracts paths, directories, and stat results. It simplifies coding shell problems in C++, it’s portable, and is maintained by a large community of contributors. The one downside of Boost is that some of its newer libraries are poorly documented. ((Something I want to contribute to.)) Until I have time to get involved in the Boost project, I’m going to post examples here. Traversing a directory tree ...