Product Launch
anonymous
300 points
53 comments
Postedabout 1 month agoActive23 days ago
Turtletoy
turtletoy.netmatureweb_appdevelopers, artists, educators
Key Features
Turtle graphics editorJavaScript-basedShareable creations
Tech Stack
JavaScript
Key Features
Tech Stack
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.
To see some demos, go to <https://susam.github.io/cfrs/demo.html>.
And I have a Forth-inspired, esoteric, stack-based, postfix, colouring language too: <https://susam.net/fxyt.html>
Booted always with disk 1 and that was Locoscript and learned typing on that thing.
When I discovered there is a second disk that boots you in some dark and hidden alternative mode (read: CP/M) I felt like a hacker.
Hidden inside this cave was the only program the manual mentioned in this section: Logo! I did not know that my PC could display anything except characters and it was. so. amazing. to see self-drawn lines on that thing.
We learned the same lessons for the parts of CPU, computer generations, Babbage and co for 5 years. Our lab exams was more means than ends, so `pir*2` will carry more marks than `3.14r*r`.
(This was around 2005 for me!)
My partner and I do maintain a complete (and extended) Logo interpreter however, so yes it really does live. Somewhat :)
That's very cool!
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
I have less than zero nostalgia for either.
I still feel pretty good. I'm still squatting 2.5x my bodyweight and not slowing down in the gym yet.
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.
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:)
There is one! We wrote it in Golang and compiled it to WebAssembly, it's a greatly extended version of Apple Logo ][:
If you want to create much fancier graphics (and games!) in actual Logo, check out turtleSpaces:
Where you get 140 characters to draw using code. (Similar as in the resulting pictures reminded me of dwitter)
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)
1. I actually trust that it's not ripping someone off so using it feels more personal and unique.
2. It's non-obvious these days when something is generative
(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.)
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