I had heard about procedural graphics, I had worked on procedural texture, but I got this impulse to go farther. I'm not quite a coder, frankly.
So when I got to try processing for Mac OS and Quartz composer, I found myself somewhat nonplussed.
No, definitely, I'm not a coder.

So where to find a software that could allow me to make some interesting patterns, fractals, grids, seamless textures and so on, without having to get through the whole C++ started book ?

I lost hope for a while, facingthe fact : I would be an uneducated procedural barbarian.

Then I stumbled upon a pretty little piece of software, cross platform and simple and requiring the very minimum knowledge in terms of programming Context Free.

A context free grammar is a description of a language in a set of rules. Each rule says how a single symbol can be expanded into a sequence of other symbols. Those symbols may, in turn, have rules and can be expanded again. Some symbols are terminals and have no rules. A legal sentence in the described language is a sequence of terminal symbols that can be produced starting with the start symbol of the grammar and proceeding via some sequence of expansions.

The process is considered context free because each expansion of a symbol via some rule can be done independently of any of the expansions of other symbols.

In Context Free, the only two terminals are the shapes CIRCLE and SQUARE. Given a starting shape, the program keeps expanding shapes that have rules until all that is left are terminal shapes, which are then drawn. In essence, the rendered images are legal sentences in the language described by the rules file!

After five minutes reading the documentation, I ended up doing this kind of pictures :

After some more tries, these

So, if you're a beginner in procedural graphics, give it a try. It's at least, a wonderful toy.

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