How did you find out about Context Free?

[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?

[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.

[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 .

[kipling]

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

[phonx]

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

[TimothyAquat]

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

Thanks.

[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.