Bitscreech

Following from my work on The Bitspeech Sonnets, I decided to take up the challenge issued by Nick Montfort to generate 50,000 words in a program of 256 characters or less.

There is so much that can be done with simple programs that consume very little energy and can be fully understood by their programmers and others.

My end result is Bitscreech, a generator short enough to fit in a tweet. It uses the same set of vowels and consonants as Bitspeech to generate a stream of random words, formatted into semi-rhythmic sentences and paragraph breaks.

I’ve never really been into code golf much, but this is a really interesting constraint for NaNoGenMo works. It encourages an apprehension of the intrinsic complexity of a 50,000 word text; what to include and what to give up on (punctuation and formatting or a meaningful narrative effect?).