JFugue and The Charm of Computing

(Ed's note: I just flew in from Canada -- and man, are my arms cold. A belated Happy New Year to all the fans/readers/critics of CodeToJoy.)

If you want some fun, check out this article by my friend and colleague, Lance Finney, over on the OCI Java News Brief.

It covers 2 projects for writing music in Java: JFugue and ABC4J.

I have only played with the former, JFugue, but it is a blast! Lance's examples are easy to start with. If you are like me, it is impossible to resist tweaking them to come up with some new melodies.

Also, if you are like me, you might try JFugue with Groovy: it works fine. There are some distinct advantages that I will post later on in the week (hint: G-strings, which may be the only time that term is both salacious and musical).

After reading through the article, I spent some time mapping a little jingle from my guitar to a JFugue program. It was absolutely addictive, and brought me back to the days of no-frills computing in high-school: a time when we truly worked on a program for the pure joy of it. Just a text-editor and some immediate feedback through sounds. Fantastic.

I think JFugue might be a terrific way to introduce children to computing, esp. if they have a bit of a musical background. Don't use the fancy GUI editor: make them hammer it in like we did in the old days!