In memory of Stephen Hawking
Hi There
You are on an old Macbook, let’s say 2012 model. There is no wifi where you are, and your phone is dead. You are locked in your friend’s house and don’t have the owner’s password to install new things on Mac OS. At the same time, your head is blossoming with new ideas for tiny interactive prototypes, programmatic data visualizations, generative art, and makeshift design tools. It would be nice to run Processing but it’s not already installed. It would be especially nice to install XCode and do OpenGL things, but that’s also a matter of download and install. It looks like you are stuck with whatever is on the OS right that second, and will be for many hours of isolation. It’s just you and the computer. Let’s write some code that paints cool pictures without installing anything new. The name of the game is being familiar with what’s already on there, gems waiting for you. This article will not teach you the basics of programming. If you’d like to do that, please check out my fun intro to C++, which is chapter 2 in ofBook. Fair warning, this article will get pretty fast with Python, HTML, and Javascript without going into great detail about the how and why of code writing. Please think of this as a casual tour in that sense.
Why Coding This Way is Important
E-waste is a growing problem, representing 2% of America’s trash in landfills, but equaling 70% of overall toxic waste. 20 to 50 million metric tons of…
