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jcelerier • today at 1:14 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Customer request: make a software that makes drawings that look good/my style/...

Where do you start for formalizing this?


Replies

kodoman • today at 1:28 PM

I mean would you take that spec as something you could deliver? This is not a real problem spec and is incredibly vague, but the first question would be around building a formal model for the drawing part of the application (and is the main aspect of the program) that might be easier then it first seems. There are various ways you could model the draw window depending on if it's a rasterizing program or a vector program either way not challenging, then formalize the operations of the program (various effects will necessary be well defined mathematical functions in the first place) and then prove what ever you feel you have to prove about the system. This is not to say it is easy or especially in this case you should even do it and my point was more about the system aspect of things or things that one would want to be able to reason about.

An example of a spread sheet program might have been more productive example or a http API server or some kind of middle where program. I feel like you picked the most obtuse example possible even though my point was not to cover all possible programs that one might want to write.

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yababa_y • today at 1:18 PM

for example here was how some design rules got formalized into a checker during a video editing session of several hours: https://github.com/emberian/vidbox/blob/dev/render/drc.py