Orca – esoteric programming language, designed to create procedural sequencers | Hacker News Reader

Orca – esoteric programming language, designed to create procedural sequencers

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249 pointsprofstasiak38 comments

Orca is amazing, and it's creator Devine Lu Linvega is inspiring too.

Listen to this future of coding podcast where he is interviewed about Orca: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045 and about making your own tools: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

The Future of Coding podcast is a treasure.

Edit: excerpt from the Devine Lu Linvega's intro:

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Devine Lu Linvega and his partner Rekka live on a sailboat. He makes art, music, software, and other cultural artifacts. When Photoshop’s DRM required that he maintain a connection to the internet, he wrote his own creative suite. When his MacBook died in the middle of the ocean, he switched to Linux with hardware he could service. His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that’s out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth.

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Most recently, he's actually rewriting all his tools in a forth-inspired language he's designed himself: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html

I made an online environment for UXN programming, assembling, and emulating the CLI environment using emscripten

https://metasyn.github.io/learn-uxn/

check it out if you're learning uxn or just want to try loading a rom and seeing the source or modifying it to learn

"His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that’s out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth."

I used to live and program off grid, too. With a setup, I could carry all in my backpack ... so I can say, it mainly depends on the hard- and firmware in use. So my pure linux laptop did not last very long. Even with allmost only texteditor use

But my optimized rugged chromebook does last a long time, and with only modest sunshine -> unlimited worktime - with extensive use of chrome and electron.

What rugged chromebook do you use?

Acer C201.

But it might be not avaiable anymore but I think the successor is similar.

I put it in dev mode and worked mainly with chrome dev tools as IDE and a simple texteditor for node scripts. That worked well and I did not needed more.

There is in theory a linux vm, but last time I tried, it was buggy and performance intense, so no option for my days work, but good to have the opportunity to have more powerful tools at hand at times, like inkscape, because chromeOS as itself is not so nice to use and very limited in every way, but what works, works.

Think I've read somewhere that those can be reloaded with pure Linux to replace Chrome OS. Not saying you should, only nothing that one probably could.

Here is another nice short interview on esoteric.codes:

https://esoteric.codes/blog/100-rabbits

I'd recommend checking out their YouTube channel — they document sailing from Vancouver to New Zealand and back! A lot of this work was done along the way.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HundredRabbits/videos

Heh, Forth isn't a write only language if it can be recognized. Happy accidents.

I'd like to point out that Rekka is also a creator of Orca.

I made a livecoding site for playing around with Orca, alongside a tutorial of sorts. It's already patched to a synthesizer so it's ready to go, and has examples/tutorials you can load.

https://metasyn.github.io/learn-orca/

I wish this existed the first time I came across orca. Awesome stuff, thanks for making it.

Oh this is absolutely gorgeous, deserving a post of its own if ORCA weren't already on the front page.

I love ORCA, but sharing that passion with other people is difficult due to the effort needed to get started with it. Now I can just direct people to a website.

Thank you so much for making and sharing it.

glad others enjoy it! checkout https://orca.wtf as well, a similar, fun project that includes MULTIPLAYER

Orca, and all of Devine's work, is some of the most inspiring content on the internet imho.

Check out his personal site[0] as well, it's a work of art.

[0] http://xxiivv.com/

Can echo how absolutely impressive (and in some ways trippy) their site(/personal wiki) is. I go back to it once every few weeks or months and just wander around a little bit.

I absolutely adore orca.

Data and instructions are just the same thing (single characters), and can go from being one to being the other. Combine that with the fact that the program "executes" on the same surface that you write it, like the editor is at the same time your 2D canvas and the program modifies itself by 2D animation.

Maybe these ideas exist elsewhere but it just completely blows my mind and I feel like i haven‘t even fully "got" it yet. Would recommend it to anyone interested in programming, even if you‘re not interested in music making. Also, where else are you gonna get to use base36?

Looks like only this for past threads:

Orca: 2D esoteric programming language where every alphabet is an operator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22664484 - March 2020 (1 comment)

Allieway had some cool videos about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

It feels to me like a mix of SimTunes and Befunge.

Came here to link these as soon as I saw Orca mentioned. Her videos helped a lot with getting started.

Orca is amazing. It inspired me to start writing my own version as final project for a final project for my Serious Games class in college. I'd highly recommend anyone checking it out

That class sounds interesting! Is there a syllabus or other documentation online?

The course is https://schedule.msu.edu/CourseDesc.aspx?SubjectCode=MI&Cour... . I can't find the syllabus but the professor was really interesting - one of her games made the news: https://apnews.com/article/06bd2f8b19b7446aa8629a7ef9924da5

Here's my presentation on my project if anyone is interested: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UXS9jES6dQW1GsB7YXRp...

There is an excellent introductory tutorial to Orca by an artist that goes by Allieway Audio[0]. It is by far the best video overview of the system that I am aware of.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

Maybe I missed it, but a video and/or some significant examples on this page would be useful near the top.

I found this helpful when learning orca: https://youtu.be/ktcWOLeWP-g?t=222

Orca is great fun. I was inspired to start write a derivative application - A live-coding logic simulator using the same TUI ideas. I've just got past the prototype-hackery stage and am using it to model a real piece of hardware.

https://asciinema.org/a/447367

https://github.com/birchb1024/betula/blob/trunk/README.md

Kudos to Devine Lu Linvega

  .1D2..V2..2D5.....2D3....5D8......8DD.......2D3..........
  ..\*:04......:01B....:03D...:04P.....:08F......:06J.......

I started porting uxn to libretro here https://github.com/kivutar/uxn But the audio part is yet to be done.

It shares a lot of traits with Game of Life. 2D grid, ruleset, emergency.

> where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame.

Anyone know what a 'bang' means in this context? Not sure if it's an Orca-specific thing or more general.

It means the ! character

edit: at least, that's what I normally see it meaning. I'm also confused about what it means here

It's Orca specific.

A bang in this context triggers the character one coordinate down and the one coordinate right of the bang character - which is '*' - and deletes itself after one tick.

I may have remembered some details wrong, it's been a while.

It seems like a general-purpose message that nodes can send to neighboring nodes, so they can be activated in response to input events, clock cycles, and so on. In other contexts you might call it a "pulse" or a "tick."

I'm not familiar with Orca but I am familiar with the use of bang in Max/MSP[0], in which it's used as a generic event trigger for attached objects. Objects receiving a bang message will execute their main method. The context feels similar here.

[0] https://docs.cycling74.com/max8/tutorials/basicchapter02

A bang is normally a name for a !

In the case of ORCA a bang is an activation

So a clock periodically emits a bang that can be used to trigger the synth for a simple example.

The me that first moved to Bushwick about twelve years ago would have thought they are super cool

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