On: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

[billswift]

I have never done any graphics at all. All I know is bash and some awk and perl, mostly for text processing. I keep planning to learn more, which is why I read about it a bit, and browse HN, but I have too many other things I want to do too.

[bmelton → billswift]

Who says you need graphics?

o | o | o ---------- x | x | x ---------- o | o | o

That (if HN doesn't mangle it) should be a fully working Tic-Tac-Toe board. You can store it as a string, hashtable, whatever you want. You could label the squares 1-9 for the prompt asking the user where to move.

This is all doable with perl and a command line. Try it out, see what you learn.

[nkassis → bmelton]

My first implementation (in c++) was exactly like that. A 3x3 array that printed out like that. You had to enter 1,1 for the left upper corner (that's how I learned that arrays start at 0 in almost all languages ;p)

[Paulomus → bmelton]

Yes, GNU Go, the premier open source Go program is implemented exactly like this. Any graphical front ends in use are all written by third parties.

[bmelton → bmelton]

HN mangled it, but I think you can see where the line breaks ought to go.

[sophiebits → bmelton]

    o | o | o
    ---------
    x | x | x
    ---------
    o | o | o

[ido → billswift]

It's actually really easy to do simple 2d graphics, you can probably learn how to draw 2d rects/circles/etc on the screen in 10 minutes.