There were two languages that would have suited the explorations developed in the following three studies. One is Processing, which is a relatively new, open-source language developed for a cross-disciplinary audience of computer programmers and visual artists. The language was introduced to help these two groups learn how to explore the other field in a relatively easy-to-learn programming medium. The other language is AS3.

I chose AS3 for a number of reasons. First, Adobe Flash is a popular application environment among scholars and instructors affiliated with computers and writing. Second, there is, in fact, an open source Flash development community. Although Adobe Flash is a commercial application, programmers working in AS3 distribute source code widely under open-source licenses. (If you are interested in open-source Flash, I recommend Chris Allen's book titled The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development). Third, AS3 is a relatively easy language to learn. Pedagogically, this makes the “learning-curve” much less steep. The code is English-based, which means that many of the commands and concepts are intuitive, and a student can write the traditional first program, the “Hello, World” program, in a single line of code. For a non-programmer, AS3 will make the transition to writing code a little less intimidating. Finally, AS3 is based on the internet language standard known as ECMAScript. In the 1990s, the ECMA (the European Computer Manufacturer Association) proposed an internet language standard based on JavaScript and JScript. The proposed standard has gone through several versions, the most recent of which is ECMAScript 4. The fact that AS3 conforms to this standard means that it may very well stand the test of time. In fact, due to its standardization, ActionScript programmer and writer Bill Sanders has called AS3 “the language of the Internet.”

The following three studies delve fairly deeply into explanations of the code, but I don’t go through every single line. Rather, I focus on the “algorithmic” lines of code. In The Language of New Media, Manovich explains that software is comprised of databases and the algorithms that manipulate them to generate results. For all intents and purposes, the numbers and text displayed on the screen are database values, and the lines of code related to their creation are not that interesting; they are mostly set-up. The provocative aspects of these three projects—especially from an Oulipian perspective—are the lines that manipulate the numbers and text to generate the on-screen texts.

All of the code cited in the three snowball projects is in a zip archive in the Downloads section. The code is distributed as “freeware” under the GNU General Public License.