Ronin – A Lisp-based image processing tool
I've been following Ronin and the author for a few years now from a distance. As I have said in other threads on hn about this work, the theme and ethos are so consistent and thorough they just slap you in the face. You know exactly what is going on with Ronin, Oscean, Orca and it is a pleasure to see such clear manifestation of intent.<p>Ronin in particular is the most fascinating piece of this network to me. I was hooked by the (broken) version 1.0 when I first found it a couple years ago and played around a bit with fixing it. It played well with a few other key influences in my life and I've been playing around with similar--albeit prototype--systems ever since.<p>To name one stand out feature. I have been playing around with generative design/creative coding/coding art for a while now and I seem to be on an edge of the domain. My work lately has been increasingly taking a set of starter points, so to speak. I have shapes or layouts in my head that I want to run through the generative process, but I am distinctly starting with these hard coded values.<p>Ronin provides direct manipulation on the canvas with `$` prefixes in the code. If you type `$point`, then click on the canvas, "$point" is replaced with code representing that point. The simplicity of this interface for writing code that heavily involves numbers in context (ie on their domain) is an inspiration. There are probably a couple of names for this connectivity, but one might be bi-directional evaluation. Manipulations in code yield the canvas, and manipulations on the canvas yield code.<p>There's a lot going on here, xxiivv.com<p>And some fun to be learned by poking through git commits. If you know Orca, (was popular here a while back) it didn't start as a music generation system.<p>Edit:<p>Ronin tutorial video, 5:22. First 30s tease the original version I saw. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgAWGh1s9zg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgAWGh1s9zg</a><p>Old version tutorial/demo 4:09 : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifzjhyBwOc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifzjhyBwOc</a>