From: Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@...>
Date: 2006-05-28T19:05:18+09:00
Subject: ASCII art 2.0 (was [QUIZ] Dungeon Generation (#80))

This is a fantastic quiz. I find it very interesting that ASCII art  
is so effective for quickly generating basic graphics. I think the  
great thing about it is its supreme ubiquity. There can't be too many  
languages where you can't  print out some monospace text with a  
handful of lines of code.

However, it seems a little sad that in today's world of stupendous  
graphical processing power, and lovely displays, we can't trivially  
go a little bit further. I'd really like to see a library that is:

	1) Completely ubiquitous. ASCII's degree here will be hard to match,  
but for a given set of platforms (say Ruby on Unix, Win, OS X, common  
hand-helds) it should be possible.
	2) Works out of the box. It _must_ come as part of a standard  
instal, and before that, be well packaged. It must not need lots of  
extra installation of components. It's got to be pure ease in a glass.
	3) Makes the easy things easy.
	4) Make hard things quite easy.

3) Making the easy things easy.

ASCII does this wonderfully. You can't get much easier than "puts  
':)'". BBC BASIC did it too with: "MOVE 100,100; DRAW 200,100". Logo  
also did it well with "fd 100".

Right from the outset, you can start to draw things. You don't need  
to create contexts, add them to windows, create an event loop, blah  
blah blah. You just begin. Brilliant.

4) Make the Harder things quite easy.

Ok, so full on GUI packages have useful things in them. Widgets that  
know how to behave and render themselves. We've got 3d, and  
scrollable surfaces and particle systems... All sort of great stuff.  
I think these things shouldn't be so much harder though, and their  
presence should not stop the easy things being easy. It's important  
to have a gentle progression from simple stuff to harder stuff.

Anyone got any thoughts in this area? :)

Cheers,
	Benjohn