Friday shitposting. 1 May
Thirty-five years ago, in April 1991, I started this project.
The idea was quite simple: use the DRAW operator in QBASIC to draw a stylised “1 MAY” banner. The DRAW operator offered only a small palette of graphical possibilities, and my drawing skills were far outmatched by my ambitions — so the project stalled.
Now I think that actually completing a task is often more important than doing it flawlessly. So here we are: the First of May greeting is finally ready.
A few words about the DRAW operator language. It uses a state-machine-style drawing approach with a traced cursor position. Initially, the cursor is in the centre of the screen. Then there are movement commands: R, U, L, and D for right, up, left, and down, plus E, F, G, and H for the 45-degree directions.
For example, U10 moves the cursor 10 points up and draws a segment. BU10 moves the cursor up without drawing. P11,15 paints the current area, flooding it with colour 11 until it reaches areas coloured 15. There are a few more details in this tiny language, but you get the idea.
For me, 35 years ago, it was quite a revelation that there could be a programming language inside another programming language. Nowadays, DSLs — domain-specific languages — are a powerful tool that every professional engineer should have in their tool belt.
It is also worth mentioning that the languages used by 3D printers and similar machines are quite close in spirit. It would be totally possible to convert this program into a 3D-printer version and print out the title.
Maybe one day...
Feel free to check out my project online - It runs in QBJS, a browser-based QBASIC environment implemented in JavaScript.
P.S. Almost an LLM-free post. The program is hand-written, and the screenshot is honest. Only the text of the post was polished.