Piet: Programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (2002)

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

by andsoitis • 2 years ago

447 71 2 years ago

sedatk• 2 years ago

Piet is a milestone experiment among the esoteric programming languages, but I believe that it falls short of achieving its goal to make programs look like Mondrian paintings unless the developer really intends to do so.

I wish the language structure were designed in a way that anything that’s “written” with it would look like a Mondrian painting.

jack_riminton• 2 years ago

Yes well unfortunately Mondrian only really used the primary colours so that would be rather limiting

wouldbecouldbe• 2 years ago

just have to make them really big

euroderf• 2 years ago

But FWIW Mondrian also showed how to convert a more conventional style into his signature style. This can be seen in Still Life with Gingerpot, numbers 1 and 2.

btbuildem• 2 years ago

Could encode more operators into shape ratios / proportions, line thickness etc.

shever73• 2 years ago

It could be done. The FizzBuzzLang esolang uses only the words FIZZ, BUZZ and FIZZBUZZ.

mellonaut• 2 years ago

The last program on the examples page⁰ truly is amazing:

A guy (called Piet!) saw an artwork that reminded him of Piet (the lang) and tried executing it¹.

It ran! [...] This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident.

[0] https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html [1]: https://gitlab.fabcity.hamburg/hofalab/piet-get-together

gnfargbl• 2 years ago

I did enjoy the one which computes π;

Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program.

I think that's a first for me.

schoen3• 2 years ago

Isn't there an obfuscated C or Perl competition program that also estimates pi by measuring its own code in some way?

Edit: Oh yes, it's "westley" from 1988: https://www.ioccc.org/years-spoiler.html#1988_westley

mzi• 2 years ago

https://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/obfuscate/pi.c

If I remember correctly, this program also calculates pi more precisely the larger the circle.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Piet J. (yes, that's his real name) was browsing art in a small gallery and saw a work which reminded him of a Piet program. He spoke to the artist, who claimed to know nothing about the language. Piet took a photo of the artwork (left), converted it into a clean image file using close colours from the Piet palette (right), and tried running it.
It ran! The code executes an infinite loop which reads in ASCII characters and prints out the corresponding numerical ASCII values.

Get out of town. Get right out of town.

abrookewood• 2 years ago

I just read that ... incredible. I mean the language itself is just bizarre, but that story tops everything.

thih93• 2 years ago

This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident

While impressive organically, it sounds easy when targeted; we could design a programming language where an image of Mona Lisa prints "hello world" - and claim a similar feat.

Perhaps the reverse is more interesting - programmers accidentally wrote a language that could treat real world abstract art as valid input.

cinntaile• 2 years ago

Perhaps the reverse is more interesting - programmers accidentally wrote a language that could treat real world abstract art as valid input.

Isn't that what happened here?

thih93• 2 years ago

update: actually we have perl, https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

lifthrasiir• 2 years ago

If you relax the "functionally" condition enough, it has been already shown that most paint splatters (including art pieces) are actually valid Perl [1].

[1] https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

nightpool4• 2 years ago

I think the issue in this case is that the Perl programs were "really" created by OCR hallucinations, not graphic artists. Piet, on the other hand, is really executing the painting itself.

dylan604• 2 years ago

and yet, I can write a line of Perl today that I will not remember how/why it does what it does tomorrow. I don't know if this says more about me or the language other than I don't do it enough any more. However, the fact that paint splatters are better than I am is just proof that it is not the language for me

indigoabstract• 2 years ago

It ran! [...] This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident.

I think this truly deserves a CS Ig Nobel Prize, if there were one, for making people laugh and then making people think.

blauditore• 2 years ago

I wonder what the chances are that a simple painting like this (a few large rectangular blocks) is a valid program. From skimming the documentation, I tend to think even that every such image would run without error, given that "Any operations which cannot be performed (such as popping values when not enough are on the stack) are simply ignored, and processing continues with the next command."

However, another question is how many of such random images would actually do something "meaningful".

boothby3• 2 years ago

Sadly, that depends on a discrepency between npiet and the current Piet spec:

The interpreter now begins sliding from its current white codel, in the new direction of the DP, until it either enters a coloured block or encounters another restriction.

The npiet interpreter, instead, rewinds its position to the last colored codel upon peeking through whitespace. One of these days, I intend to add that behavior as an option to the lexer in my Piet compiler[1], but I haven't bothered yet.

Following the spec, the program is a trivial nonhalting loop because the extreme corners of almost all blocks are white-adjacent. Writing complex Piet programs to target multiple interpreters and compilers is quite the challenge, as they've all got subtly different undocumented interpretations of the spec. I think that the output of my Piet backend is more or less interpreter-agnostic, but I've only dug into the details of three or four other interpreters.

[1] https://github.com/boothby/repiet/

andoando9• 2 years ago

Holy shit! Ive been trying to do something just like this for ages.

Wish the sample programs were shown in action.

pyinstallwoes4• 2 years ago

What were you trying ?

andoando9• 2 years ago

Still trying, but a programming language for visuals where one can define some primitive transformations like two blocks being added, a block moving through space, etc and use transformations to create bigger transformations and so on.

shagie• 2 years ago

https://sanguinel.github.io/PietPlus/

Save the image of the program and import it (e.g. https://www.toothycat.net/~sham/fizzbuzz.png ). You can then step through it.

There are several other implementations listed at https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

andoando9• 2 years ago

Neat, thanks. This really needs an automatic stepper though, or just a gif maker.

donalhunt• 2 years ago

This is the type of thing, I'd expect to show up in a (crime) thriller, stumping the protagonist / investigators until someone deduces it's a code.

And we all thought QR codes were useful...

bocytron• 2 years ago

The samples page is amazing. You can see the evolution of the canvases, becoming more and more sophisticated and beautiful to took at.

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

shrikant• 2 years ago

I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language.

I'm dating myself with this reference, but some of us old data fogeys might be wondering (well, I am, at any rate) when Piet came out compared to Pentaho's OLAP engine called Mondrian (https://mondrian.pentaho.com/documentation/olap.php)...

nightpool4• 2 years ago

Apparently, the exact same year.

OscarCunningham• 2 years ago

This person made a quine in Piet: http://mamememo.blogspot.com/2009/10/piet-quine.html?m=1. The image there is broken, but there's a copy here: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/23255/103045.

renke1• 2 years ago

We had a small course in university on esoteric programming language. Each of us had to select a language (Brainfuck, Piet and a few others) and play around with it. I chose Piet and had a lot of fun with it, but to be honest, my small example application was not really aesthetically pleasing. I guess you have to be a Piet expert to make art with it.

hansoolo2• 2 years ago

This is so cool! I wonder if it is possible to get a Piet piece together, where the program returns a certain text given. Like a Piet code generator...

Would make for a great present as print!

boothby3• 2 years ago

I did one of those for a codegolf challenge once, it was fun! DMM links to it on the examples page; I'm somewhat amazed that it's still up on pastebin.

https://pastebin.com/zxc9V3UX

hansoolo2• 2 years ago

Very cool! Thank you! :)

inglor• 2 years ago

Needs a (1990) in the title?

juped• 2 years ago

I don't think it's that old, but it's way older than 2018

xpointer• 2 years ago

It's 2001 according to the esolangs wiki. https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

MalcolmDwyer• 2 years ago

It would be interesting to relax the color requirements such that you could encode a program into what looks like image noise. Sort of like steganography, but instead of hidden data, it's a hidden executable program.

whatrocks• 2 years ago

Discovering Piet is a special moment of awe and confusion and wonder. Mine was captured in this chat with my friend Oz in our Computer Science podcast “The CS Primer Show”: https://show.csprimer.com/episodes/e2-dont-let-a-gpt-have-al...

einpoklum• 2 years ago

Note that "light" is considered to be one step "darker" than "dark"

Now that's deep.

nightpool4• 2 years ago

Piet is from 2009, at least. Although this page was last updated in 2018 with some new links i don't know if having the (2018) title makes sense, it feels kinda misleading

WillAdams• 2 years ago

This has always raised a question to me:

What does an algorithm look like?

Is there a real-world possibility of creating something like to _The Glass Bead Game_ from Herman Hesse's novel (originally published as _Magister Ludi_)?

As a visually oriented person, I'd like to think so, and have actually tried to use such tools:

https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/...

but the danger has been, for want of an unambiguous answer to the afore-mentioned question, they always run the risk of:

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/

and it's hard striking a balance between visual expressiveness and modularity (which all-too readily results in the wall of text which one is presumably trying to avoid).

boothby3• 2 years ago

What does an algorithm look like?

Writing Piet by hand is a fun way to explore this. Sergei Lewis[1] and I[2] have each written tools to generate Piet code. Sergei's assembler makes much nicer looking code than my Piet backend. All you can really see from my compiler's output is that I'm really lazy and used a trampoline[3]

[1] http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?MoonShadow/Piet

[2] https://github.com/boothby/repiet/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trampoline_(computing)

andoando9• 2 years ago

I have a belief that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between any algorithm, or even any mental conception, and a visual representation. I got this idea reading one of Steven's pink book, in which he says that any abstract word can be broken down into simpler words which in the end describe some spatial relationship. For example to "rekindle" is to "bring two things back together".

It is easy similarly to say that a for loop is the mental conception of "one thing going over a bunch of other things", which has a visual representation like "100" -> "010" -> "001".

I wonder then if its possible to create a language where one defines these constructs purely as visual transformations.

Pompidou2• 2 years ago

any abstract word can be broken down into simpler words which in the end describe some spatial relationship

What if my computing model rely on quantum phenomenon ? Maybe some of them don't have good visual representation. But it's a guess. I don't know...

Regarding the global idea of your comment: what about languages such as J it APL or BQN ? In such languages each character is an atomic part of algorithms (in j, two characters are used to implement dynamic IF for instance. One character only is used to define the dimensional depth of each part of algorithms). In this way, iversonnian languages can be seen as general and pure visual representation of algorithms once you consider each J or APL character as an arbitrary glyph.

pyinstallwoes4• 2 years ago

That reminds me of some thinking I did regarding the primordial gods one finds across many cultures: The penis and vagina symbolism, the first physical objects representing ontology as building blocks.

From there, we spatialize and logicize concepts like "mine," "like me," "unlike me," "other," "in front," "back," and "forward."

Additionally, at the risk of igniting flames, I find it interesting to ponder the significance of gender in the current zeitgeist. Could attacking gender at a political level be a form of assault on sense-making, tugging at the roots of ontological logic centers in the brain? Might this destabilize civilization centers deemed as enemies by some? Feels like the right exploit from a hacker mentality.

andoando9• 2 years ago

For simple programs you can also imagine just implementing a Turing machine where the symbols are colors.

madcoderme• 2 years ago

This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident.

More accurately, a programmer accidentally came up with a language that can run on real world paintings

sdmike1• 2 years ago

I ran into this in university and burned a late night writing a simple program. It was a really fun experience that I would recommend people try at some point!

dang• 2 years ago

Related. Others?

Simplified Piet interpreter written in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33130954 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)

Piet, a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913483 - Dec 2019 (19 comments)

Piet – A programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13503841 - Jan 2017 (12 comments)

Sample programs in the Piet programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11342442 - March 2016 (27 comments)

Piet – visual programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266653 - March 2016 (1 comment)

Piet Program Gallery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727702 - May 2014 (4 comments)

Enterprise Piet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698737 - Oct 2012 (39 comments)

Piet: programming with pixels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430357 - April 2011 (3 comments)

Piet is a programming language, whose programs look like abstract art. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166462 - March 2010 (28 comments)

Piet: a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235975 - July 2008 (1 comment)

And you thought BrainFk was hard to understand... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139872 - March 2008 (2 comments)

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Bonus:

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370228 - Oct 2022 (71 comments)

schneems• 2 years ago

I loved this talk about building an implementation of Piet by one of the jruby maintainers https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uKGecSc-r1o

chw9e• 2 years ago

It would be cool if you could build an autoencoder that took code in python or another less esoteric language and learned to output it into piet. Then you could do something like stable diffusion and get random algorithms.

amai• 2 years ago

Can Dall-E or Midjourney paint Piet programs?

Piet: Programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (2002)

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