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**Mikeal Rogers:** Wow... I'm impressed. |
**Rachel White:** My brain can't comprehend writing SVGs by hand, so that's pretty impressive. |
**Alex Sexton:** I always start trying to write them, and as soon as I have to declare the size on the board in two different places, I'm dead. I don't know if you guys have ever done it by hand... It immediately confuses me. |
**Rachel White:** \[44:00\] I mean, I could do a square, but that's about it, probably. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There we go... I think something interesting about this is that it's really giving you a lot of simple code paths for declaring and doing different kinds of math. You could build a lot of great libraries for just doing interesting math operations on these primitives... So I think this could actually ... |
**Rachel White:** I mean, the mid-level API seems really accessible for people that even aren't used to writing a lot of intense SVG stuff by hand, because it defines the shapes in plain English where then you just have to supply the parameters for the points where your shapes are going to be created in the graph. I do... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, it seems to open up a lot more... There's plugins for D3, right? |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, there's a lot. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a lot of plugins, but they plug into that API; they're not abstractions on top of it where you give them different parameters and they spit out new stuff, right? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I think that's pretty common, actually... D3 is so low-level that there are plenty of charts libraries that just use D3 as the underlying thing. I'm sure you can supply D3 objects and things like that, but there are whole charting libraries where you don't have to know that D3 exists, that use D3... |
So this would be similar to that... You don't have to know SVG. It depends. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think you have to know D3 in order to get a D3 plugin in. Also, I haven't seen anything that was in npm install, this library... Or even just a library that you could take off the shelf that included D3. A lot of those chart libraries that you're talking about, I always had to include it as a scrip... |
**Alex Sexton:** Bower for sure. \[laughter\] Yeah, most of those libraries are so far from working, even in JS DOM. It hasn't been a huge thing. But now that everybody uses Webpack to be able to pull vendor stuff out of Node modules and into actual files, I think it's all there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Not everybody uses Webpack. I don't use Webpack. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sorry... \[laughter\] Every time... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, this is really nice, though. This seems like something that could be used together with a lot of other libraries. It's exciting. |
**Alex Sexton:** Just to throw in some negativity - not specific about this library, but D3 is a big doer of my problem... I cannot read any of this... |
**Rachel White:** Oh my gosh... |
**Alex Sexton:** I've never been able to look at this... They're constantly using Xs and Ys, which I understand is fundamentally the thing they plot, but it just instantly looks like garbage to me, and I have no idea what's happening. I just want way more comments or a much higher level API than this. Like, "make graph... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. |
**Alex Sexton:** And I think that's true of D3. There is no D3 visualization that didn't initially come from Mike Bostock's demo set of visualizations, modified from there. I'm not sure I could use this library; I don't do a ton of SVG, but I don't know if I could very quickly pick this up, because it kind of fundament... |
**Rachel White:** \[48:05\] I don't think it's for you... \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** It would be part of my job to implement some of these things, for what it's worth. The graphs is absolutely something I could get assigned at work at any given time. |
**Rachel White:** I think that the people that primarily do data viz programming, it's helpful for it; it probably makes a lot more sense. I'm looking at it and a lot of it makes sense to me, but also why do you have me put in a semi-regular polygon -- oh! Those make sense... |
**Alex Sexton:** I get it... I can read through it, and eventually be like "Alright, so we're doing a modulus of this; that way, the colors change, and we're doing a list of these little elements that show up next to each other, with spacers..." - I get it. It's just... Compared to all other types of programming, it is... |
But there are things like processing JS that kind of flip that on it. I can understand processing JS, or processing... The goal of that project was to have syntax that makes more sense for visualizations. I don't know... Interesting. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I still feel like this stuff is more understandable than any WebGL stuff that I've ever seen, even with good tools... Even with Regl and Mikola's stuff, it's like, "Okay, import this algorithm that does I have no idea what, that operates on an N-dimensional array." \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... To be clear, my concerns with this have more to do with my own inadequacies than it does with any inadequacies of these libraries. I think that I have a common inadequacy when it comes to visual graphics programming like this. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that this is why they invented the DOM... To give a semi-usable way to do visual programming. Even though it's such a mess, at least it doesn't have that kind of bar to get over. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So with that, I think we're gonna move on to the individual picks. Let's spend a little bit of time this week talking about that. Rachel, why don't you go first? I was checking out your pick... |
**Rachel White:** Sure... My pick isn't necessarily new, but it is exciting and I feel like not enough people that do creative coding really know about it. It's called Tracery. It is a library where it allows you to write grammar objects to make generative stories in an easier way. A lot of people that do Twitter bots ... |
The way that it works is you have an object with key-value pairs for each item that you are going to swap out, and the value is an array of a bunch if different strings that it could be for that object. I've seen a bunch of really cool poetry things done with this, but the main reason that I wanted to talk about Tracer... |
\[52:15\] So there's this website called cheapbotsdonequick.com, and it utilizes Tracery and allows you to automatically create your own Twitter bot. One of the most popular ones that I usually tell people about when I'm talking about this is @softlandscapes (which has a ton of followers on Twitter). What it does is ev... |
If you go to the cheapbotsdonequick.com site you can see the source code, and it hurts my brain to look at. It's the Tracery JSON for the SVG that is generative. So that is my pick of the week. It's fun, and it gets people to make some stuff. That's it. |
**Alex Sexton:** Do you want me to go next, Mikeal? Is that what your silence implies? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh my god, I was just talking, but I had it on mute. \[laughter\] No, I was just saying (like, to nobody) that this library is sort of like those "fill in the blank" stories, where... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, mad libs. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Like ahead of time, somebody's like "Oh, hey... Give me a name of somebody, give me a thing that you do to somebody else", and then you get a hilarious story at the end of it. Mad libs, that's what they're called! |
**Alex Sexton:** Rachel said it earlier. |
**Rachel White:** Have you played mad libs as an adult? Because now they all just turn to horribly inappropriate things. |
**Alex Sexton:** I don't know... When I play, it's always just like "A butt walked into a fart, and farted out a butt." \[laughter\] Pretty much the same as when I was a kid. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so I'll get into my pick. I picked Lemonade Stand. It's a repository from Nadia Eghbal, who is the co-host with me on Request For Commits. She put together this amazing page of basically every open source funding model that you can think of... Everything from getting paid by a company to wor... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[54:56\] Cool. My pick of the week is a polyfill, so it's really a pick for the DOM... It's the Intl.js library. I think a lot of people don't use Intl, they're still using various random plugins, but I would love to see more standardization around internationalization, and formatting, and things like... |
And the polyfill is Andy Earnshaw's polyfill; that just goes on top. It doesn't do things like collation, because it's really tough and there are some algorithms it doesn't do, but it's pretty good, because Safari obviously is still hurting us here. They don't have Intl. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Does it convert foreign exchange rate currencies? |
**Alex Sexton:** No, no... Obviously not, Mikeal. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay... |
**Alex Sexton:** That's a very specific question, though... You should hire someone. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I'm actually looking to go to Europe soon and I'm so happy with how strong the dollar is right now, it's really nice. I've actually never gone to Europe this cheaply before, so.. |
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