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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I am blown away by this intuitive explanation of why Julia sets look the way they do.

I was obsessed with the Mandelbrot and Julia sets waaaay back in high school, with writing programs to produce them in real time, back on my 386. But I never had the slightest understanding of why they looked the way they do. So to discover that now, almost 20 years later, is just amazing.

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I could have easily written this comment! My favourite programming memory of all time was finally succeeding in turning the pseudo-code at the back of a book[1] that my mom had bought me into a Turbo Pascal program that would generate a Mandlebrot set. It was exhilarating!

[1] http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0671742175/tag=canaamp-20

Me too - among my first, and best, programming experiences was turning pseudo-code into QBASIC and marvel at the fractals and strange attractors growing on the screen.

I did so as well. I was fascinated that such a simple formula could produce an infinitely complex image. To build it, I used Lazarus/Freepascal and Wikipedia. It’s actually still hosted on Google code.

Me too - I wrote a Mandlebrot generator on the Amstrad CPC 6128 (3.7MHz Z80 based computer with 128kb RAM) after reading a copy of "Chaos" by James Gleick that I found in the school library. It took 3-4 hours to generate a 16 colour image of 160x120 (Mode 0?) and used some undocumented calls into the BASIC interpreter ROM for the floating point calculations. I'm sure I could have made it faster but I was producing it as a static image for a demo (demo scene).

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