Perl Poetry Generators in 256 Characters (opens in new tab)

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

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 ?