From: Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@...>
Date: 2006-05-28T19:34:33+09:00
Subject: Re: ASCII art 2.0 (was [QUIZ] Dungeon Generation (#80))


On 28 May 2006, at 11:30, Ross Bamford wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 19:05 +0900, Benjohn Barnes wrote:
>
>> 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".
>
> Ouch. My earliest programming experiences were with basic and logo on
> the Amstrad CPC, and later the Spectrum. They did this kind of  
> thing and
> I have to say, in the twenty years since then, I've never yearned  
> to do
> it again :) It's all well and good until you have a thousand lines (or
> more) of 'move here, draw this, select this pen, move here...' and  
> find
> an errant green pixel in the middle of the screen...
>
> Hmm, this may be why I still have a strong aversion to all forms of
> graphical programming (including GUI)...

:) Ah. I love graphics programming, although I do agree that it could  
get hairy back then. I think that's before I learnt about  
"abstraction" though. I've noticed that I've been doing less and less  
graphics though, and I think it's down to the barrier to entry that  
currently exists. That's what I want from this hypothetical library.  
The smallest barrier to entry possible, and the smoothest learning  
curve possible... I think those two properties are the reason that I  
like Ruby too.