• I’ve been a professional software developer since 1995. Þe þing programming can do today which most impresses me is create real, physical objects.

When I was most OCD about programming, in my teens, I spent so much time writing code þat I’d have dreams where I’d write a program to send pizza þrough a dot-matrix printer; and sometimes I’d wake up and still be trying to figure out þe code for it for a few minutes before I realized it wasn’t actually possible. Today, we’re really not too far from þat; maybe not food, but you can print parts and household goods, and we’re getting closer to consumer-affordable multi-material compound objects. We’ve landed on þe moon wiþ software, and commercial airplanes fly because of it, and it’s killing and rescuing people in Ukraine.

I spent my career programming purely informational programs wiþ limited direct effect on þe real world, which was lucritive but which also saddens me a bit; but so much software directly interacts wiþ physical reality and changes our world, and þat’s wild.

Curiosity in young people who also discover design, modeling, English, electronics and other related subjects as they learn it.

TeX for documents, posters, presentations,…

Good programming makes soldiers indiscriminately kill.

“AsCode” is so freaking neat to me. Mermaid.js make diagrams as code. Openscad so you can CAD as code. LaTex for making writing mathmatical formulas (and more it’s a very rich mark up language). Reveal.js to make a slideshow as code. Markdown can make some really nice documentation. With tools like Markdeck so you turn that into a slide deck.

The infra as code and config as code (k8s yaml, helm, open tofu, ansible, Guix, nix, etc) are also super powerful but are kind of just tools for computer people. Though some of policyAsCode stuff seems like it can start to blur some interesting lines too, either by putting weird things k8s, or in your ci/cd workflow or by OPA/cedar integrations.

There is also digital twins! Eclipse BaSyx is apparently a growing standard for but that is a neat thing creating really world system models that you can run simulations on but also run real world equipment off of to.

Also apparently (typing this got me interested to see what was new out there!) there is OpenFisca for modeling tax policy as code that can be used to simulate how tax code would effect households! Catala is a “laws as code” DSL for turning legal texts into executable programs. Also smart contracts, and Decentralized Autonomous Orginizations (DAOs) in the crypto space are neat as a tech (ignoring the grifting in the space since they got linked to US investment market).

If you want to create the most badass documents possible LaTeX is a sheer endless rabbit hole. Various Text formatting, page/document layouts, tables and even graphs can be created using LaTeX. It can be quite hard when getting started with it, but it do be kind of worth it when you got the coolest looking document ever.

You can use imageMagick to create pictures from scratch. As it’s a parameters configuration, and the exemple you gave are frameworks based.

But I prefer create pictures with SVG, it has animation, interaction…, this kind of programmation is more permisive and portable 😂.

PS : to complete the author’s message : Manim

Shader Editor on Android, I write my own live wallpapers right on my phone!

Minecraft: Make creepers explode more

Derail Valley: Use all the train horns

Void Crew: Automatically open all the doors (optionally includes both sets of airlock doors)

PULSAR: Lost Colony: Reduce weapon accuracy to 0

I’ve always been amazed by what can be achieved with just shaders.

There are probably better examples for artwork created with shaders, but here are a couple 3d graphics channels I like:

https://youtube.com/@acerola_t

https://youtube.com/@sebastianlague

Personally?

I generally use programming to turn artistic concepts and countless hours into regret and failure in an ever increasing pile of abandoned projects.

My back hurts typing this, but… back when I was young there was a whole community called the “scene” to explore just that question. The demoscene is still alive, but it’s perhaps a little more mainstream and “clean” than it used to be? Anyway, people are still cranking out awesome demos that explores the question: what can we do with programming? There are tons of YouTube videos of demos, old and new, but here is a video that talks about the scene and the history behind it.

OpenSCAD and my (crappy) 3-D Printer: a phone case! Whoo!

I write sheet music with Lilypond: https://lilypond.org/text-input.html

I’ve been “programming” for over 40 years.

In many ways, if not all, it’s like creating art.

Perhaps it’s best explained by saying that what I do is translate ideas into ephemeral castles constructed of notional bricks written in imaginary languages and presented to an audience with little or no understanding of the fragility of the whole piece.

It’s also what pretty much runs our world, from water filtration through food production, space exploration to shopping, transport and telescopes, research and recreation.

Programming is the first tool that humans came up with that allowed us to explore ideas too large to fit in our brains and even now, being overrun by Assumed Intelligence and Unsupervised Text Extruders, it’s still the most exciting part of humanity.