Joy.js – make happy little programs (2017)
ncase.meNicky's work is a joy and a blessing - one of a small number of great artists and creators online playing with systems and simulations in attempt to educate people through experimentation and play.
Other people worth checking out:
- Bret Victor (worrydream.com)
- Kevin Simler (https://meltingasphalt.com/)
- the "explorables" subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables/)
If anyone else can recommend other writers or makers in this area, I'd love to hear about them! It's an area that I really enjoy and I hope to contribute to when I have a bit more free time.
[edit] also I'm happy about the fact that Nicky's work often has to do with systems theory, which is one of the biggest remaining frontiers of human understanding in the universe.
Ciechanowski's work (check Gears and Curves as good examples, but all of them are good) https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
Interactive linear algebra book https://textbooks.math.gatech.edu/ila/
Visualizing quaternions https://eater.net/quaternions
Another quaternions visualization tool that reminded me that a few years ago many sites were full of java applets that were the first "explorables". Sometimes I still stumble upon old university websites that leave some space for the applet but it never loads. Sad stuff
Some tools to make them:
Observable is full of geniuses using JS to make cool brainy stuff. The other awesome thing is that you can immediately mess with their code without forking or making an account.
- Daniel Shiffman (https://natureofcode.com/, https://thecodingtrain.com/)
Nature of Code was the book that made coding click for me.
This should have (2017) in the title. Source: The date heading on the projects list https://ncase.me/projects/
updated - thank you!
Nicky is much more than a developer, creating beautiful projects to explain complex concepts. There are projects involving complexity concepts that are mind blowing
Sorry to post something unrelated, but I'm looking for a game engine posted to HN maybe a year ago.
It was a website you could make "games" on. The only tools available were 16 screens you could paint, with 16 colors. Each can be configured to jump to a different screen when clicked.
There was a gallery, with one of the more memorable games being a member from the band Kiss performing a card trick for you.
Are you thinking of PICO-8 perhaps?
This is wonderful.
I've appreciated Nikky's work for years, but didn't know they created something like this. A "Logo" for the modern web is something that I've felt has been missing for a while.
> A "Logo" for the modern web is something that I've felt has been missing for a while.
Not nearly as pretty and cool, but here's another https://theintelligentbook.com/thinkingaboutprogramming/#/ch...
Agreed! There's also https://p5js.org/
I’ve recently built a VS Code extension that adds a Joy.js Editor to VS Code and then you can save and version control .joy files.
See some progress videos here: https://twitter.com/seflless/status/1460788493500796935?s=21
This is lovely. I really like that you can adjust numeric values by clicking and dragging and the visualization updates in real time; reminds me of the demos from Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle.
Nicky's work is closely related to Bret's! They're both working on learning through play and interaction, which is imo a very important area of development.
I've been looking for that video for a long time but forgot the name... thank you
"Write JSON strings inside your JSON" is the kind of anti-pattern that software engineers have known about since before the advent of XML.