Dan Mouse

Here's my partial list, of what I can remember at the moment, and in no particular order.

1) Opa

"Opa is a concise and elegant language for writing distributed web applications." - http://opalang.org

"Opa is an open source programming language for web applications." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opa_(programming_language)

There is much to say about Opa. I recommend going through the references in the Wikipedia article.

2) BaCon

"BaCon is a free BASIC to C converter for Unix-based systems. BaCon intends to be a programming aid in creating tools which can be compiled on different platforms (including 64bit environments). It tries to revive the days of the good old BASIC." - http://basic-converter.org

BaCon is interesting because: 1) all you need is a shell and a C compiler, 2) it was created by Peter van Eerten, who also made GTK-server, and 3) it converts lazily, effectively making a BASIC-like wrapper for C, thereby allowing easy access to some of the more interesting aspects of C, which would not normally be available in BASIC.

3) Spin

"Spin is a multitasking high level computer programming language created by Parallax's Chip Gracey, who also designed the Propeller microcontroller on which it runs, for their line of Propeller microcontrollers." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller#Built_in_SPIN_byte_code_interpreter

4) Agena

"Agena provides you with all the means you need to implement your ideas quickly: fast real and complex arithmetics, efficient…

> I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons...

True, but there's an obvious intersection of the things we are interested in. We just have to figure out how to play friendly concerning the other things in our interest sets.

> Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology.

Well, the good news is that HN has posting guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Despite what certain members of the HN community would have you think, these aren't "rules", but they do serve a useful function in focusing the site on a core set of topic areas. I don't think there is much danger of HN becoming reddit in that sense. HN effectively acts like 2 or 3 narrowly focused subreddits on reddit.com.

> Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would…

I'm a lover of esoteric languages, and Piet[1] captured my imagination more than any other. So, I wrote a compiler[2] for the language, eventually writing a backend that re-targets Piet itself.

And since I love code golf, I wrote most of the compiler in the extremely tortured form that only fellow golfers can love. But I balanced the golf with extensive comments, as a bit of an experiment on the varied advice that we programmers receive about comments. Do they help? Can I keep them current as the code beneath them changes? (Jury's still out on both, but I find the juxtaposition aesthetically amusing).

Just recently, I made a friend! And by "friend" I mean that another human has written another Piet compiler[3] and it's a beautiful project and we were delighted to discuss our tortuous projects that we wrote for pure fun! So I've gotta plug his compiler too -- it's written in safe Rust! Too cool!

[1] https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

[2] https://github.com/boothby/repiet

[3] https://github.com/pwang00/pietcc/

Perhaps thing outside the tool/app along lines of default app/program values?
aka utilize different 'software' abstraction levels to acomplish something is one definition of 'software art'

X11 configuration files to make xwindows resemble a PC os ( https://zorin.com/os/ )

.login / .logout or dot file to customize how use/interact with ?? shell, xwindows, program(s)

does using unicode / ascii character set to 'redo' graphic format count as software art?

Is abusing a programming language to do something language was not setup/intended to do count as software art? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest )

Does writting a working OS in piet count as 'software art' ( https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html )

Getting multiple programs on the voyager 1 & 2 space craft to run in few k of available memory count at 'software art'?

Strange: I submitted this more than 24 hours ago and it still says so on my list of submissions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=p4bl0

But it's the same submission as this one which says it was submitted by me 4 hours ago.

I've been contacted a few times by HN moderation and was asked to re-submit some interesting link that didn't get traction on the first try, but it's the first time that I see a link be re-submitted on my behalf. Is that common on HN now?

Anyway, concerning Velato, I stumbled on it yesterday. I find this kind of esoteric languages (like Piet [1]) quite fun, and thought that others here may enjoy it!

[1] https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

That's amazing. They made an image with a blank editor, put a textarea element over it, and then transformed it and filtered it to achieve the tilt/scale/blur.

The code also changes every time you refresh the page. First time I got it, it was some php. Then C++. Then a recipe for... Fibonacci numbers with caramel sauce?

Edit: After looking up the title, the "recipe" is actually an executable program written in some esoteric programming language.

The "recipe": https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef_fib.html

Info page for the Chef programming language: https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef.html

Wow. Definitely did not expect this