I have a confession to make.  I have a lot of ongoing projects.

From a trilogy of books on programming, to a [re-read of the masterworks of science fiction](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/09/21/the-amazing-colossal-science-fiction-ketchup/), to various [love letters to Lisp](http://www.readevalprintlove.org/) [^1], to [language meandering](http://www.clojure.org), to [game design](http://fogus.me/fun/spiel/martian-whist/), to baseball, to [abstract strategy](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2xfGrCZuUMY/TyBUmASpTqI/AAAAAAAABJI/6N_9JOqDjp0/s1600/goban_stones.png), I like to flit my mind from topic to topic.  However, aside from the books that I've written, very little of what I create tells a story.  Therefore, rather than trying my hand at fiction[^2] I've decided an experiment this year to tell stories with code — via a mechanism that I'm calling *code painting*.

<a href="http://blog.fogus.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Lambda_graffiti1.jpg"><img src="http://blog.fogus.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Lambda_graffiti1.jpg" alt="lambda" width="386" height="386" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-5882" /></a>

A code painting is a source repository of indeterminate size that:

 - Tells a story
 - May or may not be generally useful
 - Should be as beautiful, abstract, or amusing as possible[^will]
 - Should be created in the spirit of exploration where the exploration itself is the goal

As you can see, code painting is about discovery, story-telling, and fun and is in no way meant as an exercise in creating yet-another-open-source-library.  The world has enough open source libraries, but it has too few code paintings.

As it turns out I've created a few code paintings in my time, most recently [Codd](https://github.com/fogus/codd), [Unfix](http://fogus.me/fun/unfix/), and [μLithp](https://github.com/readevalprintlove/ulithp), but even these need some work to lift them[^3] to the level of code paintings.  My task for 2015 is to paint these libraries and others and maybe hold a code painting exhibition at some local meetup or conference.

Let's see how it goes.

Where do you hang your own code paintings?

:F

[^1]: ... and little languages.

[^2]: Trust me, no one wants that.

[^3]: Or to lower depending on your perspective.

[^will]: If I had to choose, I would say that the greatest code painter that I've ever seen in action is [Will Byrd](http://webyrd.net/) from the University of Utah and of Scheme/[miniKanren](http://minikanren.org/) fame.