If you like this type of music, you should check out the (horribly-named) genre IDM for some slightly longer tracks - some standouts are Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Venetian Snares
I am a huge fan of Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics and Hadley's implementation of them in ggplot2. Thanks for sharing this; it helps demo the power of the grammar. Since learning GG it has made me think of plotting in an additive fashion instead of before when Excel would do most of it for me and I would often be forced to remove layers I didn't need.
That's a great site, thanks. It's not common finding such artistic taste, programming/mathematical skill, and capacity to explain well, in the same person.
They are using external libraries... I can't tell if it's a joke but if it's not then no, you didn't do it in less than 280 characters. Otherwise I can generate the mona lisa with 3 characters: m()
This kind of thing always needs some arbitrary line drawing.
Even if there no external libraries and only pure machine code, that machine code still runs in an environment defined by hardware components, and those hardware components have a lot of thought and effort behind them.
Typically, 'scene' demos like this intended to be very few lines of code run in assembly without the use of libraries, something that speaks directly to the metal, certainly usually not a higher-level language...but I've never heard of building hardware itself as being part of a 'demo' like this.
I get that you're exaggerating, but I do agree with people's sentiment that if it's using a library to handle the drawing, it's also a stretch to call it 280 characters.
I think the key for 'scene' type demos is more that the code is run in some particular environment, and the impressive part is how far the demo stretches the capabilities of the environment, and how creatively it presses against the constraints.
280 characters of R+ggplot generating art is at least cute. It's a powerful environment, but constrained input data.
I mean, no one's going to say that a demo like kkrieger isn't impressive (the famed "96KB FPS") despite using 3D rendering APIs and such, right?
That is a symbol with 0 re-use and therefore 0 abstraction. That is much less interesting than a represtentation that can generalize across a wide range of uses
But I don't think that was the point of that article. It says:
>> Now that Twitter allows 280 characters, the code of some drawings I have made can fit in a tweet. In this post I have compiled a few of them.
It's about a list of code snippets that you can send around on Twitter, that can generate interesting "art". It doesn't claim to be the shortest code that can be used to generate art. It just says it can fit inside a tweet.
