The Idea Oubliette

Yep, been a long, long time since I last posted. Over a year! A lot's happened in the past year; kinda crazy. First, I'd like to thank Unstranger for his comment on my SpaceRat post. I'd like to think I'm a decent writer, and if at least one person found it readable from a non-tech perspective, then so much the better! In late October the Mrs and I moved to Halifax, and I got a job writing code for a video game company. Oh yes, the dream has come true. :D I'm loving the work and apparently they're loving my performance! I started off on contract and just recently got hired on permanently. The raise that came along was great too. ;) What else… what else… The Mrs and I came out as polyamorous to our families. It wasn't a smooth ride and it still isn't for some of them. But all in all, how each of us reacts to things is our own cross to bear and we can't expect others to react in particular ways, even if we'd like them to. I turn 33 tomorrow, and s...

There’s a certain group of programmers out there that like to come up with programming languages just for the fun of it. Some of them have profanity as their names , and some are based on internet memes . Whatever the case may be, some individual out there enjoyed thinking up the language, and many of these languages are actually useable. One esoteric language that stands out, for me, at least, is Piet , created by David Morgan-Mar. Based on the idea of making programs that look like abstract art, Piet allows the programmer to express their software in the form of coloured blocks. Numbers are represented by blocks of pixels containing a pixel count equal to the number itself. Operations are performed by changes in hue or darkness. As an example, here is a Piet program I wrote to output the string “Hello World”. This image is in fact the entirety of the program, and can be run in any of the Piet interpreters out there. Other examples of Hello World programs are available on David’s si...