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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of another great article.

http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/graphics-like-its-197...

The author talks about how its harder to get graphics on the screen without installing prerequisite software than it used to be, and goes on to sing the praises of the ZX Spectrum and its concise and well written manual. He finishes the article with some fun coding experiments writing Clojure code in the spirit of the ZX.

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Xterm has tektronix mode which is somewhat similar. Try:

  xterm -t -e 'curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joejulian/xterm/master/tektests/usmap.tek ; sleep 10'

oh wow, that's pretty cool

Xlib is trivially easy to use if you're willing to use C. Slightly harder (but also satisfying if you have serious NIH) is the /dev/fb interface.

And there's sixel if you're using a terminal like mlterm.

Funny, I've often heard X programming described as 'not trivially easy'.

Maybe doing widgets is hard? If you just want to draw shapes on the screen there honestly isn't an easier way to do it.

If you are not too picky, there's always JavaScript and Canvas.

That's "without prerequisites" nowadays? Interesting. In my world, this requires installing one of the most complex pieces of software in existence (a web browser, plus its dependencies), on top of a graphical OS (also a highly complex network of interdependencies).

Yeah, but installing a browser is easy, compared to setting up depends for other environments.

There's the same implied prerequisite as with BASIC: you need a personal computer. I mean, you seem to know how to uninstall the browser from your laptop, but is not doing that a meaningful prerequisite?

> In my world, this requires installing one of the most complex pieces of software in existence (a web browser, plus its dependencies), on top of a graphical OS (also a highly complex network of interdependencies).

In most people's world (where "most" is probably > 95%), their computer comes with those things already installed.

Complex architectural stacks have costs beyond install in most people's world: how many layers of indirection between <canvas> and actually drawing on the screen? That's a lot of cycles spent doing busywork.

or just straight DOM:

javascript:for(i=4051;i--;)document.write(i%~80?'&#'+(9585+new Date%i%2):'<p style=margin:-.5em>')

I'm teaching 11-year old boys to do graphics in Python using the turtle module. It's pretty easy.

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