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Bookmarked! These look like amazing study projects; the kind one can copy and learn from. Quite like how they do it in art school. Each one of them looks like i

Bookmarked! These look like amazing study projects; the kind one can copy and learn from. Quite like how they do it in art school. Each one of them looks like it solves a nontrivial problem, and edifies the reader on the basic contours/tenets of the problem/solution space. I love this kind of stuff, because it shows one _can_ solve a pretty juicy problem with not that much code, honestly. Also because it suggests that the industrial-strength equivalent has a lot more in for use cases, corner cases, and/or optimisations that are not relevant for one's requirements (at least not yet, maybe not ever). I aspire to write code like that. Useful, concise, but not obtuse. Some of my code is not as significant as those examples, and maybe falls short of my ideals, but it gets a lot done in well under 500 loc. e.g. my website maker in Bash [1] (hot-builds and hot-refreshes without JS), or the JS that drives text art animations for Hanukkah of Data [2]. [1] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite is about 350 LoC counted this way (excluding the script containing HTML templates). $ grep -E -v "^$|\\s?#" bin/{events,metadata,templating,utils,hotreload}.sh | wc -l 359 [2] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/ https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/ the text art animator. $ grep --count -v -E \ -e "^$" -e "//" -e "/|\s+\*.*" \ assets/js/text_artist.js 213

eternityforest 3y ago
I think they're great for study and as art, but I don't really aspire to write programs like that. In fact most of the time I don't aspire to write anything at all. If I need a feature my first thought is "Does an existing project want this added or a plugin that does it, it does something already have it that just needs cleanup and bugfixes?" I might not always need the industrial strength equivalent, but analyzing whether I do or not takes time, and using the "just enough" approach can create fragmentation and require learning a new tool for every project, instead of focusing on one that you trust will be maintained for a while. I do value performance, but sometimes optimization gives better performance than simplicity.

eternityforest 3y ago

I think they're great for study and as art, but I don't really aspire to write programs like that. In fact most of the time I don't aspire to write anything at all. If I need a feature my first thought is "Does an existing project want this added or a plugin that does it, it does something already have it that just needs cleanup and bugfixes?" I might not always need the industrial strength equivalent, but analyzing whether I do or not takes time, and using the "just enough" approach can create fragmentation and require learning a new tool for every project, instead of focusing on one that you trust will be maintained for a while. I do value performance, but sometimes optimization gives better performance than simplicity.