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Mind-blowing work! Is there any kind of tools for "reverse engineering" or otherwise unrolling/prettifying dweets so I can study them better? It's really cool b

by kortex 6y ago

Mind-blowing work! Is there any kind of tools for "reverse engineering" or otherwise unrolling/prettifying dweets so I can study them better? It's really cool but I barely know where to begin.

tomxor 6y ago
Thanks! I've never found prettifiers to help much. Often there isn't much in the way of indentation or newlines for a formatter to be able to objectively insert. I mainly rely on the following while both making my own dweets and unpacking other dweets (which can be just as much fun btw): 1. Use a text editor: Dweets can get very dense and non linear, syntax highlighting can help a lot when deconstructing a dweet (essentially manually prettifying). I also find variable highlighting invaluable for understanding a dweet (i.e where you select one and all of the others are clearly highlighted). Often the code will be arranged in confusing ways just to squeeze extra characters out, e.g putting things in the incrementor position of a for loop 'for(i=8;i--;x.fillRect(blah))', often you will want to rearrange it to make it more legible while you are understanding the code. 2. Use Dwitter: When making new dweets or figuring out the behavior of existing dweets. The code runs as soon as you lift each finger, this creates a feedback loop between your brain and the computer which is faster than any other interactive computing environment i've seen. It seems absurdly simple but it's very powerful and you will learn a lot. JS things.. all of those niggling assumptions that you don't have time or inclination to investigate when writing "proper" code will suddenly be easy and necessary and interesting to figure out. Math things.. I usually suck at math, but when you can play with the variables and functions and watch patterns instantly change on the screen math suddenly feels like the most intuitive thing in the world. 3. Your brain: The lovely thing about code this size is it can all fit in your head with ease... After marinading in your head for long enough eventually the code falls away and the concepts remain, at which point you can think about it, run it, and manipulate it with ease. [edit] Quite a number of dweets are packed using the unicode escape trick these days to get 194 effective characters (including this one). To quickly get the unpacked code just replace 'eval' with 'throw' and it will be printed bellow the dweet. Finally there is a small but active discord group where you might find people willing to help with golfing (or ungolfing) and figuring things out etc: https://discord.gg/emHe6cP https://discord.gg/emHe6cP
- kortex 6y ago
  Wow, excellent advice, many thanks! > feedback loop between your brain and the computer which is faster than any other interactive computing environment i've seen This is such a critical piece of any workflow. It's often overlooked.

by kortex 6y ago

Mind-blowing work! Is there any kind of tools for "reverse engineering" or otherwise unrolling/prettifying dweets so I can study them better? It's really cool but I barely know where to begin.

tomxor 6y ago

Thanks! I've never found prettifiers to help much. Often there isn't much in the way of indentation or newlines for a formatter to be able to objectively insert. I mainly rely on the following while both making my own dweets and unpacking other dweets (which can be just as much fun btw): 1. Use a text editor: Dweets can get very dense and non linear, syntax highlighting can help a lot when deconstructing a dweet (essentially manually prettifying). I also find variable highlighting invaluable for understanding a dweet (i.e where you select one and all of the others are clearly highlighted). Often the code will be arranged in confusing ways just to squeeze extra characters out, e.g putting things in the incrementor position of a for loop 'for(i=8;i--;x.fillRect(blah))', often you will want to rearrange it to make it more legible while you are understanding the code. 2. Use Dwitter: When making new dweets or figuring out the behavior of existing dweets. The code runs as soon as you lift each finger, this creates a feedback loop between your brain and the computer which is faster than any other interactive computing environment i've seen. It seems absurdly simple but it's very powerful and you will learn a lot. JS things.. all of those niggling assumptions that you don't have time or inclination to investigate when writing "proper" code will suddenly be easy and necessary and interesting to figure out. Math things.. I usually suck at math, but when you can play with the variables and functions and watch patterns instantly change on the screen math suddenly feels like the most intuitive thing in the world. 3. Your brain: The lovely thing about code this size is it can all fit in your head with ease... After marinading in your head for long enough eventually the code falls away and the concepts remain, at which point you can think about it, run it, and manipulate it with ease. [edit] Quite a number of dweets are packed using the unicode escape trick these days to get 194 effective characters (including this one). To quickly get the unpacked code just replace 'eval' with 'throw' and it will be printed bellow the dweet. Finally there is a small but active discord group where you might find people willing to help with golfing (or ungolfing) and figuring things out etc: https://discord.gg/emHe6cP https://discord.gg/emHe6cP

kortex 6y ago
Wow, excellent advice, many thanks! > feedback loop between your brain and the computer which is faster than any other interactive computing environment i've seen This is such a critical piece of any workflow. It's often overlooked.