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Code painting

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, to various love letters to Lisp ¹, to language meandering, to game design, to baseball, to abstract strategy, 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 fiction² I’ve decided an experiment this year to tell stories with code — via a mechanism that I’m calling code painting.

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 possible³
• 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, Himera, and μLithp, but even these need some work to lift them⁴ 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