2003-03-16

... ?

generative art rambles

one last thought before I consign this to the net: the rise and fall of bedroom coding. as someone who grew up with BASIC and ZX Spectrums, I feel very lucky to have fallen in a sweet spot time-wise. people 5 years older than me had to tackle tiny, useless computers with no useful programming tools or compilers. people learning to program now have to deal with 500 lines of directx code just to put a pixel on the screen, and must learn .NET and lengthy APIs just to get started. perhaps the small beauty of the net languages like php, java will (are currently?) revive the bedroom coding "industry" by reducing todays over-complex home machines to a managable size.

Amen...I mentioned on the Gibson board this morning the joy of low-level programming. I too come from that "sweet time-spot". Nowadays the numourous levels of abstraction & API layers that have acrued over the years really get in the way...Nothing really beats the sheer accessability of those old home computers with their BASIC roms, switch on & go, like a pen & pad, you knew where you were with PLOT x,y ...The Spectrum was knowable... The Flash of it's day... The look of my old Alife site, G3RM.ORG, was a homage to the Spectrum; although not many people picked up on it...I did tone that down in the final version (I was originally using the ZX Spectrum font etc..); wish I hadn't really..alas, G3RM.ORG is no-more; domain-napped....(*note to self, upload it here..)..