

PlotDevice: a Python-based graphics environment for the Mac - _samizdat
http://plotdevice.io

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tree_of_item
Nice! NodeBox 1 and Processing were some of my first introductions to
programming, and I still use NodeBox 1 today to draft app icons and logos and
such. I don't care so much for the dataflow style NodeBox 3 has gone with, so
this is a much appreciated update to the original NodeBox approach.

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aidos
Great project!

After a lifetime of software development I feel that Python is one of the
friendliest languages for newcomers to programming. One thing that it has
lacked is an environment like this that makes it easy to get something on the
screen. Let's face it - it's way easier to get people excited about making the
computer draw things for them than getting it to do maths - though that's far
more exciting for me :)

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apl
Minor detail I _love_ : the example on the homepage is drawing the PlotDevice
logo in PlotDevice. Simple, but effective. Excellent presentation in general.

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andybak
How hard would it be to run this interactively in the browser using Skulpt?
Similar to how pygal has:
[https://trinket.io/charts](https://trinket.io/charts)

That would make a pretty amazing teaching tool.

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klodolph
Cool, I imagine it would not be terribly difficult to port the engine to
Cairo.

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tfgg
Lovely use of the 'with' keyword for stacks of transformations.

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crazychrome
great idea! it'll be even better if the language is Swift.

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andybak
If you're serious, would you like to explain why?

Surely this kind of thing is exactly the sweet spot for Python. Uncluttered
syntax, readable.

If you're not serious then I'm still curious what point you were trying to
make.

~~~
crazychrome
couple of reasons:

.. This is a Mac only project, therefore it's not a hard requirement to choose
a cross platform language.

.. Consider how it would be used in production. Two possibilities: a) output
as .ai, .jpg, .png to be used as imagery assets. in this case the choice of
language makes no difference. b) codes reuse in mac program. in this case,
Swift is a better choice b/c it's Apple's choice.

This project to me, a programmer, is somewhat connected to the PaintCode App.
The idea of using Swift is not a tech argument (e.g. Swift rocks, Python
sucks), rather, it's a result of reasoning.

