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Comment by andoando | Hacker News Reader

5 years ago I wanted to make animated visuals for music videos / light shows. I got the initial version quite quickly. You could make a composition of shapes and had some functions like swap these two components every 2 beats, rotate this one every 4, etc.

That got me thinking about the structure of language, how to model space-time and essentially how to build a programming language capable of building visuals through time similar to how one how would build functions in lambda calculus.

I spent countless hours on this and its become an obsession. I have hundreds of pages of scribbles and built 20 implementations trying to approach the problem another way, got stuck somewhere and restarted. Im closer than when I started but I am burnt out. I really wanted to build a sensible prototype but short of that I just feel like I'm nuts and its all close to worthless.

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If you're not showing your prototypes to people to get feedback as you go, you'll easily burn out. We need feedback, as humans. The only artists I know who work in a vacuum are bitter and misanthropic.

I'd love see what you have arrived at, if you'll share it.

True, but IME showing your prototypes to people and getting ignored also seemingly leads to burnout (sample n=1)

Being ignored is a kind of feedback - if there is no interest then either the project has no value or it needs to be improved or pivoted. If you belive in it strongly, keep interating and getting feedback, in as short cycles as possible.

Customers often do not know exactly what they want.

Ive been pretty hesitant to share without a solid prototype or even a solid model on paper. I can write about my thought process I suppose.

Even though it sounds like the journey was the goal, you may want to look at TouchDesigner, which is a powerful tool for this use case.

https://derivative.ca/

I have seen this. Its pretty cool and I do want to learn it.

What I am thinking of is much more of programming language though. The fundemental object is something like a composable tree with some additional state.

Have you considered going the react way?

What I mean is that the react core library does not assume an html target but rather builds a virtual component tree that can be mapped to various semantics (the two I know of are react-dom that produces a DOM and react native that produces whatever is used in mobile UIs)

You could sorta recycle the idea or maybe check if React with SVG might be enough for a (low frame rate) prototype.

It does indeed sound like a very infectious obsession, I hope I can forget about the idea :-)

I did do something similar with Svelte, but the rendering aspect is the last of my issues really.

>It does indeed sound like a very infectious obsession, I hope I can forget about the idea :-)

If you don't I could use someone to talk these things through.

That project is the LSD of coding.

- you get instant visual feedback

- the problem space is infinite and depends heavily on framing and psychology

- success is a moving target based on subjective goals

IMO, "build a system for X" is usually a trap. It's psychologically safer to "build a system for music videos" than to actually make a music video.

Funny you say that. I got the inspiration in part from weed hallucinations. I'd be listening to music and when I closed my eyes, I'd see this moving beautiful 3D colorful visuals. I thought it was astonishing that our brain could come up with these geometric structure and transform them in any way possible. I've spent ALOT of time thinking about the minute details of what Im doing when I imagine shaping/shifting objects in my brain, etc.

In my mind, this is far more than just about music videos, that was just my initial goal. But yeah you're 100% right, its an endless pit of trying to do everything and constantly moving goal posts. I wish I stuck to doing something simple and fun and gone from there.

Don't feel bad about scraping it for now, I'm sure nuggets you bury will show up as gold bars for something else down the line.

Thats what Ive been telling myself among whatever else to keep me going.

Im sure theres truth to it. Nonetheless I think I need to take a break and do something easier/straightforward for a while

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