November 11, 2025
Code or hieroglyphs?
Array Programming the Mandelbrot Set
From math doodle to instant GIF: fans cheer, others squint
TLDR: A developer rebuilt a famous fractal in Uiua, a niche language that auto-turns output into a GIF. Commenters love the instant visuals but debate readability, comparing it to regex: fun for quick tasks, scary to save for later.
A dev dusted off an old fractal—the trippy Mandelbrot—and rewrote it from J into Uiua, a wild “stack-based array” language that auto-turns your output into a GIF. Cue the crowd split: one camp is mega-hyped, the other is clutching their readability pearls. “Mega-cool,” gushes a newcomer, before admitting Uiua looks intimidating and totally unfamiliar. Another voice compares these languages to regex (the cryptic text tricks used in search): awesome for quick, interactive wizardry, but you might regret saving it for later when nobody can read it.
Drama bubbled around the author’s aside that AI helpers (LLMs) are “useless” with Uiua—some cheered the human-only purity, others joked they’d need a Rosetta Stone for this “glyph soup.” The big debate: Is instant visual magic worth the future headache of deciphering the code? Fans say the auto-GIF feels like living in the future. Skeptics say that future looks like hieroglyphs. Even non-coders got hooked by the mesmerizing animation, while veterans traded war stories about code you can’t revisit without crying.
Verdict: Art vs. legibility. Uiua’s gif-slinging glam has people swooning, but the regex-style “great now, inscrutable later” warning siren is blaring.
Key Points
- •The author revisited an old Mandelbrot set implementation in J and translated it into Uiua.
- •J’s programming model (right-to-left evaluation and dyadic verbs) is compared with Uiua’s stack-based array paradigm.
- •The Uiua version defines operations and constructs complex-plane coordinates to perform iterative computation.
- •Uiua’s interactive environment automatically renders the computation output as a GIF.
- •The J implementation uses the 'viewmat' utility to visualize the Mandelbrot pixel matrix.