Strange Loop

I attended Strange Loop for the third time last weekend, and the experience was as awesome as ever. This year, I had the honor of giving a talk, and I think it went over well! I talked about the history of the architectural design of Alda, and how the relationship between Alda and Clojure has changed over the years as the architecture has evolved. I concluded the talk with a live demo showing how I compose music algorithmically by writing Clojure code that generates Alda code. Here’s the video; stick around ‘til the end for a musical score generated using forecast data from the National Weather Service!

The Strange Loop organizers upload videos of the talks super fast, and they’re all up on YouTube already, so I thought I’d share a few of my favorites:

Recreating forgotten programming languages, for art! (Sher Minn Chong)

To be honest, talks like this one are the real reason that I go to Strange Loop every year. I’m a sucker for any talk that involves making art with computers, and generative art is a really broad subject, so there’s a lot to explore.

Sher Minn Chong went down the rabbit hole of early computer graphics, reverse-engineered some of these early computer-generated works of art, and shared with us a couple of libraries that she’s been working on to reproduce the experience of using forgotten languages like ART 1 and EXPLOR.

One of those libraries is art1.js, a JavaScript implementation of the 1960s language ART 1. Whereas ART 1 produced art to be printed on a line printer, art1.js displays its results in the terminal, but the techniques used to generate the art remain the same. Interesting patterns are created by printing characters on a grid, then printing other characters overlaid on top in geometric patterns. The results are very visually satisfying!

Voice driven development: who needs a keyboard anyway? (Emily Shea)

Emily Shea suffers from repetitive strain injury (RSI) in her wrists, which is a common problem that software developers face. She shared with us how she has become part of an online community of people who use voice recognition software like Talon to write code. Her talk included an entertaining and truly awe-inspiring live demo where she wrote some Perl using her voice. She is even able to commit code to source control and make a Pull Request in the GitHub UI, all without touching her keyboard. The audience was captivated as we watched her control the computer with her voice quickly and fluently.

The best part of the talk is that it added the term “whale quench” to my vocabulary. I won’t spoil it by explaining it here – you’ll have to watch the talk!

Minimalist piano forever (Mouse Reeve)

I enjoyed Mouse’s talk at Strange Loop last year about generating maps of imaginary cities, so I was excited to see that they were giving a talk again this year, this time about procedurally generating a version of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 that lasts forever.

Mouse analyzed the structure of Gnossienne No. 1 and observed that it consists of small “chunks” that are sequenced together in various orders. They recorded the probabilities of each chunk being followed by another, and used this information to generate an “infinite gnossienne”. They rendered the music by sending MIDI messages in the browser, and used VexFlow to display the sheet music in real time. The bizarre, randomly generated, Satie-like instructions above the measures of music (e.g. “Be diligently gaunt”) are the icing on the cake.

If you can’t tell already, I’m really jazzed about Mouse’s procedurally generated gnossiennes. Check them out here and then watch the talk to see how they did it!

Unison: a new distributed programming language (Paul Chiusano)

Unison is an open source, statically typed, functional programming language influenced by Haskell and Erlang. It has a unique property that I haven’t seen in any other programming language: code is content-addressed. Each function is identified not only by name, but also by a hash of its content. Functions are stored on disk as a serialized AST, and they depend on specific versions of other functions.

This property has some intriguing benefits. The system is set up in such a way that there is “no build”; the code is basically self-contained. The compiler is easily able to tell what changed, which enables caching; for example, if you change one function, you can easily re-run tests just for the specific part of your codebase affected by the change.

Most interestingly, it also makes it possible to send functions over the wire to other nodes, which would allow you to do things like perform expensive computations on another machine running on a server somewhere. The idea that programs can deploy themselves and describe distributed systems is baked into the language.

An alpha 1.0 release of Unison just recently came out, and I’m eager to try it out at some point. The language is full of interesting ideas!

Other talks

As usual, there were a ton of interesting talks; check out the Strange Loop YouTube channel for more!

Mantra & Chronoid

In 2015, I created two ClojureScript libraries that complement one another:

• Mantra: a library for making music with the Web Audio API

• Chronoid: a library for scheduling events with super-accurate timing

I hadn’t touched either library since 2016, but then the other day, a guy named Kiran submitted a pull request to make Chronoid compatible with a change that Chrome made in April 2018 to prevent audio from playing automatically when you navigate to a page. This was an awesome contribution, and it prompted me to spend some time revisiting Chronoid, cleaning up the code and fixing a couple bugs that I found in the process.

The result is that I published chronoid 0.2.0 and mantra 0.6.1, the first releases of these libraries in over 3 years!

As I was testing Mantra and Chronoid prior to releasing the new versions, I was happy to hear the blips & bloops that showed me that the libraries still work nicely, even after over 3 years of development in browsers like Chrome.

If you ever find yourself wanting to make chiptuney music in the browser by writing ClojureScript, give Mantra a try!

Comments?

Reply to this tweet with any comments, questions, etc.!