andthennothing.net

Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) [via Boing Boing] is a really neat programming language for creating pictures using context free grammar (well, duh!). Most of the examples are fractal-like pictures, and those structures are very easy to create. The language is really simple and there are only two shapes (cicle and square) that can be scaled, positioned, brightened and rotated. The nice thing is that all operations are relative which enables pictures that are seemingly complex. Another thing is that randomness is built in, so if you define the same rule more than once, the renderer chooses which rule to use.

There are applications for Windows, Mac and *nix which include some nice examples. And there is also a web version with colors and extended syntax (which I haven’t played with).

I made this starfish as I was evaluating the language using the Windows application, but then I rendered it using the web client as well. Rate My Starfish! :-)