#graphical programming

Nonetheless, it’s still a fascinating story! And one that we can learn a lot about in the graphical programming field--knowing where what we do came from can help us to see where it’s going and where we need to work to continue evolving our trade. The anecdote is told by Andy Hertzfeld, a fellow developer on the original Apple Macintosh alongside Bill Atkinson and can be found here: http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&index=0&topic=QuickDraw&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&detail=Show+Everything . The source code for QuickDraw and its associated painting software, MacPaint (Think Microsoft Paint but earlier and for Macintosh!) was released for the public to view in 2010--analyzing it and seeing how things were done originally with two buffers to give an undo is fascinating! It’s also where the “Marching ants” for selections in graphical programs originated, as it turns out. It’s amazing to think that these things that we see everywhere now originally started with just MacPaint. The source code can be found and downloaded here for those interested: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/ Just a bit of programming history for ya. :)

Graphical programming is such a mentally challenging task, at least to me right now. How in the sweet fuck did people ever evolve it to the point that video games are at right now? Like, I know a lot of it is building on engines that make it easier kind of like how Photoshop has a shit ton of bells and whistles to makes things a hell of a lot easier than MS Paint, but that hard to start somewhere and compared to making 2D forms react to mouse positioning in very specific ways like I'm doing right now, all the intricacies of physics engines and 3D models with huge polygon counts and making collision boxes work correctly and the endless other things that go into making a game work, that shit is INSANELY impressive. I can't even imagene what the source code for something like Minecraft would look like, which I believe is written in JavaScript. And I don't know if you can really even start to imagine how complex everything that's going on really is until you're doing the basic shit like this.

This is one of the areas where MindTrains will need careful design, as the metaphor strongly shows the execution flow, but representing changes to data and variables is less obvious.