
Piet is a programming language, whose programs look like abstract art. - psawaya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_(programming_language)
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davidw
Quick! Something interesting. Let's mark it for deletion!

(Sadly, it looks like they've already made two attempts on this article)

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elblanco
Well, it appears that downvote abuse seems to have somewhat abated after a
rash of downvote hordes around the new years (goodness that was
annoying)....now they just flag and delete everything in sight when it doesn't
fall into their personal concept of "interesting".

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l0stman
I might be mistaken but I think davidw was referring to earlier attempts to
delete the article on Wikipedia, not Hacker News.

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dandelany
See, for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm_%282nd_nomination%29)

From the deletion discussion: "Previous AfD was a trainwreck due to offsite
activism."

Translation: People from the "rest of the internet" stepped in to clarify how
important they thought the article was, so they decided to declare the
discussion invalid.

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tomerico
The collection of sample programs is fun to look at:
<http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html>

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Deestan
The program for calculating Pi is my favourite. "Naturally, a more accurate
value can be obtained by using a bigger program." made my day.

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dmoney
There was an obfuscated C program that worked the same way: a circle of code
used to get its own area and radius. I can't seem to find it though.

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koenigdavidmj
The Wikipedia page on the IOCCC has it. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOCCC#Examples>

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Roridge
I am so tempted to waste half my day playing with this. One day this will
replace 3D barcodes and people will get mobile phone apps from soda cans.

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kaddar
The idea of those barcodes is to maximize the reliable, storable information,
regardless of format. If you make the information bytecode for a programming
language, people would be able to get mobile phone apps from soda cans without
needing to program in an esoteric programming language.

Using something like piet doesn't maximize reliability (error correction) and
thus isn't good for that domain.

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Roridge
yet.

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kaddar
No.... Not at all.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your reply due to its brevity, but again, error
correction is the primary concern of these barcodes, and given that they are
good error correctors, you can put what data you want within them, be it an
underlying visual programming language or text.

If by "yet" you mean your proposal is to expand on these visual languages by
making a programming language + error correction system, you're not adding any
value that didn't exist before, it is the same thing as what already exists.

And besides, it's better to just give the user a URI and then they can
download the application from a more robust location.

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Roridge
By "yet" i meant "at this moment in time you may be correct, who know's what
the future will bring".

I agree in principle with your points, but my point was "one day I can see
something like this replacing the space where the 3D barcodes are on cans now"

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Groxx
This is really cool. Lots of possibilities, and just _imagine_ what the
steganography crowd would think if they got ahold of it.

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sonnym
Obligatory esolang wiki reference: <http://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet>

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j23tom
where can get this stuff the author is smoking ? ;)

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allenp
Although you're being funny - I have to say that when I see things like this
programming language that are so outside the box for me, it really does feel
like there is some drug induced transcendence going on. I love this stuff, it
makes me think - what if we used color as meta information in C what would
that look like? The program flow is 2d now instead of just down the screen,
what about adding dimensions or layers like in Photoshop. So yeah, for me,
mind blown, point taken.

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aquadoctorbob
Check out Befunge ( <http://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge> ) and its n-dimensional
siblings. It's a favorite of mine.

