So recently I’ve stumbled upon a video, where a guy creates an animation by programming it with maanim.
And after that I also found a way to create music with programming too.
So I’m wondering… What else can you actually create using programming? Besides the obvious software, VR, AR and all that
My back hurts typing this, but… back when I was young there was a whole community called the “scene” to explore just that question. The demoscene is still alive, but it’s perhaps a little more mainstream and “clean” than it used to be? Anyway, people are still cranking out awesome demos that explores the question: what can we do with programming? There are tons of YouTube videos of demos, old and new, but here is a video that talks about the scene and the history behind it.
I’ve been “programming” for over 40 years.
In many ways, if not all, it’s like creating art.
Perhaps it’s best explained by saying that what I do is translate ideas into ephemeral castles constructed of notional bricks written in imaginary languages and presented to an audience with little or no understanding of the fragility of the whole piece.
It’s also what pretty much runs our world, from water filtration through food production, space exploration to shopping, transport and telescopes, research and recreation.
Programming is the first tool that humans came up with that allowed us to explore ideas too large to fit in our brains and even now, being overrun by Assumed Intelligence and Unsupervised Text Extruders, it’s still the most exciting part of humanity.
First of all, I like the alliteration of examples I always struggle with things like that, and alliteration is an obvious (now, to me) bridge for these.
explore ideas too large to fit in our brains
Another excellent explanation of programming.
And it really does describe the programming of tasks, from punch card weaving machines, to punch card data entry, to direct data entry, to punch card processing, direct processing, and eventually the whole Operating System, Assembly, and Higher Level Languages… And all of the steps between that have since developed.
You can become an expert in memory management, and that idea fits into your brain. And you build the APIs that mean memory management doesn’t have to fit into other people’s brains. So they can work on instruction optimisation, or storage optimisation.Standing on the shoulders of giants.
There is so much that can be solved with programming these days, but actual people have so much more… Peoplesness, humanity, realness… That some things aren’t worth programming yet… That problem hasn’t been solved yet
Personally?
I generally use programming to turn artistic concepts and countless hours into regret and failure in an ever increasing pile of abandoned projects.
Well, I’m quite lazy as a person, so I have a lot more of not yet started projects then not finished ones
I think I’m gonna move the goalpost on my life goals a bit.
New Life goal: Have more started projects than projects relegated to the ideas drawer.
- I’ve been a professional software developer since 1995. Þe þing programming can do today which most impresses me is create real, physical objects.
When I was most OCD about programming, in my teens, I spent so much time writing code þat I’d have dreams where I’d write a program to send pizza þrough a dot-matrix printer; and sometimes I’d wake up and still be trying to figure out þe code for it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t actually possible. Today, we’re really not too far from þat; maybe not food, but you can print parts and household goods, and we’re getting closer to consumer-affordable multi-material compound objects. We’ve landed on þe moon wiþ software, and commercial airplanes fly because of it, and it’s killing and rescuing people in Ukraine.
I spent my career programming purely informational programs wiþ limited direct effect on þe real world, which was lucritive but which also saddens me a bit; but so much software directly interacts wiþ physical reality and changes our world, and þat’s wild.
