Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design and art

Thanks, Brett! <3 :)

Thanks for sharing, love the sketchbook. I'm into tree structures, cellular automata and other models of computation, fractals, etc., so immediately I resonated with your artworks. Oh and you do light art too, that sounds cool! I imagine there are tons of fun things you can do with mathematics, geometry, and light projection.

Of the thi.ng library I've only looked at a few modules so far but I really like the clean organization, functional style, and how each module is independently useful. The whole thing has good taste, a quality that's hard to explain but "you know it when you see it." I'm looking forward to playing with it, like a new box of Lego blocks, haha.

No comment of value other than to say thank you for putting (and keeping) your art out there. Genuinely beautiful, some of it. And the generative towers gave me a chuckle; that was fun. GL with the family. I do believe I'll have a few new desktop backgrounds after today : )

these are lovely my guy

It's extremely modular and simple and extensible. It's a collecting of small libaries that makes generating arbitrary vector graphics extremely fun. You have a base SVG layer and on top you have a charting library, 3D models and other stuff. It also comes with a ton of cool math mini libraries. If something is missing it's very easy to write your own.

All the pieces are very decoupled and in pure Clojure (unlike a lot of the heavier scicloj stuff that's being use nowadays)

@geokon made some good points. The library is very well thought out, easy to use, simple, data driven, composable. The author is eager to help with questions.

Author here. The move to TypeScript was due to multiple reasons, one of them as you mentioned. In these early years, there were very few people in the Clojure community which had an interest in these topics (general visualization/geometry related), and which wasn't just about art btw. Still, I managed to teach a dozen or so workshops from 2011-2017 and form a small community. In hindsight, Clojure/ClojureScript took off much more around 2018/19, 1-2 years after I left... c'est la vie

From a technical POV, the main reasons I started looking at other languages (Go, C11, TypeScript) back in 2015/16 were: Better performance and less effort required for working with low-level primitives & APIs. I also got more interested again in embedded development (wrote a long blog post about it[1]). The final decision was when I started using thi.ng for a large 5 year computational design tool/project at Nike...

Many of the language features introduced with ES6 (esp. generators, iterables, spread operator, Map/Set, Promises), suddenly made Clojure/ClojureScript feel much more clunky and I felt I can have a lot more fine grained control and performance with much less ceremony/effort, once I implemented (and usually also vastly extended!) some of the key Clojure features/datatypes myself... Working with modern Web APIs (WebGL, WebAudio, WASM, async/await etc.) all became so much easier...

The literate programming (LP) approach I used initially (between 2011-2016) was using the "standard" Emacs OrgMode Babel setup which I found an incredible amplifier for my work[2][3]. Emacs was widely used among the Clojure community back then, but LP itself as an approach _was_ unusual, still is, and scared people off...

[1] https://medium.com/@thi.ng/the-jacob-s-ladder-of-coding-4b12... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/9w8i2g/comment/ec7xv... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/9deyxe/comment/e69...

I really wish that there was an agreed-upon/universally-accepted Literate Programming system (or that for a given system, sufficiently varied tools for availing oneself of them as to foster acceptance), but pretty much every programmer's approach is unique, incompatible, and a hurdle for anyone else to use their code....

Just wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48468029