Eigenmumbles

When I was a freshman in high school, I took a class called Data Processing. This was an introductory programming class, taught in BASIC at the time. I’d already been programming in BASIC for a few years at that point, so I tended to finish the assignments early. This left me with a lot of leftover time sitting in front of the computer in the labs. Rather than twiddling my thumbs, I played with the graphics on those machines. The result was a set of simple demo programs that made pretty pictures, creatively named NEATO1, NEATO2, etc. The floppy disk on which they were saved still probably sits in a box at my parents home, though I no longer own the hardware that would read it.

I still write such codes today – little one-off programs to try out an idea or just to see what happens – but now these codes cross a half dozen languages, and they tend to relate to my research. If I were a freshman in high school today, what would my “neato” programs look like, I wonder?