How did you find out about Context Free?

Please check here FIRST if you are having difficulties with Context Free. This forum contains answers to the most common questions users have.

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ColorMeImpressed
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How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by ColorMeImpressed »

Not a technical question, but still Context Free related, so I stuck it in the FAQ section. I'm curious about when everyone first learned about this program, how you learned it, and all. I found out about Context Free from the tutorial in Make magazine issue 17 four years ago as a sophomore in high school. I had never written any code for anything before, so this was my first programming experience of any sort. What about the rest of you all?

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mtnviewmark
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Re: How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by mtnviewmark »

Well....

In 2005 I read a post on Boing-Boing about an automatic computer science paper generator called SCIgen from some folks at MIT. In the releated work section on their site they mentioned: "We initially based SCIgen on Chris Coyne's grammar for high school papers; Chris is now making neat pictures with context-free grammars."

I went and looked at Chris Coyne's pictures and was entranced by what I saw. (You can find some of Chris' work in the gallery.) His program, CFDG, was a command line tool that you ran in Linux, and produced black-and-white images. The edit-run-view cycle was really long, and I wanted to rapidly play with the grammars and see the results quickly.

Fortunately, Chris' work was open-source. Two weeks later I had the first Macintosh version, and a month later John and I released ContextFree 1.0 for both Macintosh and Windows. Chris was excited by the evolution of the project and built the first version of the on-line the gallery. In July, ContextFree got mentioned in Boing-Boing, and things really started to take off.
I'm the "m" in "mtree.cfdg"

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Monkstone
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Re: How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by Monkstone »

I first found context free in summer 2009, at the time I was looking for algorithms to create a shell shape (with a view creating such a shape in processing). I was very encouraged by helpful hints from both MountainViewMark and Kipling .

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kipling
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Re: How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by kipling »

From a link buried in a slashdot discussion back in 2008.

phonx
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Joined: Sat Feb 23, 2008 9:57 pm

Re: How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by phonx »

I didn't know contextfree was slashdotted which link??? :D

TimothyAquat
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How did you find out about Context Free

Post by TimothyAquat »

I saved a post as a "draft" but now cant find how to get to it. Does anyone know?

Thanks.

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MtnViewJohn
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Re: How did you find out about Context Free?

Post by MtnViewJohn »

You can access your drafts through the user control panel. You access that by clicking on your username in the left column of links.

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