Rational Idealist

I am always interested in ‘arty’ aspects of creative professions – when does design or architecture become art, why couldn’t entrepreneurship be considered art etc. code and software engineering can be beautiful as well, so this project si really wonderful:

Creative Project Invites Developers to Write ‘Code Poems’

Artist and engineer Ishac Bertran has launched a project that invites people to submit poetry written in any coding language. These code poems will be considered for publication in a book. A code poem is simply a poem written in any programming language including C++, HTML, C#, SQL, Objective C, Applescript and Java.

via: www.wired.com

i’m just a bit sad that there are no inspirational examples on the site yet, so I feel obliged to write about some cases where I have recognized ‘beauty’ in code before:

• obfuscated JAPH snippets are mind-boggling in sometimes very profound ways. my absolutely favorite is this piece of code, that uses only reserved words to print out “just another perl hacker” when run:

not exp log srand xor s qq qx xor
s x x length uc ord and print chr
ord for qw q join use sub tied qx
xor eval xor print qq q q xor int
eval lc q m cos and print chr ord
for qw y abs ne open tied hex exp
ref y m xor scalar srand print qq
q q xor int eval lc qq y sqrt cos
and print chr ord for qw x printf
each return local x y or print qq
s s and eval q s undef or oct xor
time xor ref print chr int ord lc
foreach qw y hex alarm chdir kill
exec return y s gt sin sort split

This image is a program code!

• esoteric programming languages, like brainfuck, are awesome, but Piet is the king of them all. I guess it’s not surprising that you can write a program code as a picture, but after you see it in action, it still give a sense of profound connection between digital and organic world.
• and lastly some blatant self-promotion – two years ago I started an online unicode art gallery, čšž.si, where I try to use only html/css/javascript basics to present the wealth of worlds languages and scripts, and where every ‘gallery piece’ displays it’s own source code.

Related articles

• Can code really be poetry? (thenextweb.com)
• Creative Project Invites Developers to Write ‘Code Poems’ (wired.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Every now and then I have to code something to see if i still remember. also lately i’ve become very passionate about infographics and tools that make it easy to visualize large datasets. Gapminder‘s bubbles are great, google maps can be great, but i feel they are also to heavy for some use cases.

incidentally I was browsing trough an old encyclopedia and saw a great simplified map of the world assembled from squares and rectangles in place of countries. so i thought i’d try coding a world map in pure xhtml/css, using colored div elements. it’s pretty easy actually. check out lightweight map of the world.

i took data about central points, width and length of all countries from CIA world factbook, calculated screen pixels from coordinates, and consider length correction towards the poles. the output is not w3c valid yet, but it’s not far from it 🙂 if anyone is interested in the script leave the comment or ping me…

i was pretty disappointed by wikipedia and freebase; they are both non-comprehensive, which is a serious problem for visualizations.

Related articles

• Art and the Web: Line (thinkvitamin.com)
• Progressive Enhancement Techniques 1: the HTML (blogs.sitepoint.com)