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Perl Poetry Generators in 256 Characters (nickm.com)
62 points by raldu 916 days ago
4 comments

Great to see this here. Nick is a fascinating artist and a wonderful teacher. I highly encourage you to play around with constrained net/programmatic art, it can be a lot of fun and the results can be surprisingly cool. Here’s a piece I made as an exercise for his class! https://freezine.xyz/montfort/program1.0/
the tobs

  mons at pats

   taws to mims

   cant at coes

   cabs of tash

   ras of monk
the coke

  pall no cock

   cast of cosh

   mams on cang

   hash of cobs
the bule

  coat of bums

   dick to cats
Is this valid english (am not native) ?
very nearly, but not quite.
Is this like if some words (most of them) are "failed" ? I mean, like if someone was mincing his words or obfuscating them or being drunk and being lazy to articulate ?

The occasional "not failed" words keeps it on the thin line of being understandable.

*wipes tear
Had a go at translating the first generator into Lil[0]. Not quite as terse as the Perl version, but not terrible:

    on b x do list random[extract list value by floor index/2 from x] end
    on w do list b["cococacamamadebapabohamolaburatamihopodito"],
                 b["estsnslldsckregspsstedbsnelengkemsattewsntarshnknd"] end
    on l do "\n\n  %s %s %s" format w[],b["attoonnoof"],w[] end
    sys.seed:sys.now
    print["the %s%s" w[] l@range 1+random[9]]
Selecting bigrams is rather awkward, and I have to explicitly seed the random number generator, as it is deterministic by default.

[0] https://beyondloom.com/tools/trylil.html

1980s-grade ChatGPT ?
indeed, and much more environmentally friendly. so much so that after I switched to this I cancelled my orders for an EV, heat pump, and induction stove top!