Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I have enjoyed using Groovy in the past, and even think it might be the nicest (programming) language in the world, so I thought I would try using it for a fun little project. Perhaps I should have remembered how difficult it was writing a graphical program in Java (on which Groovy is based), or perhaps I should have given up when I realised that Debian doesn’t have a nice Groovy 2D graphics library packaged yet, but my hubris got the better of me and I waded in, trying to create the game Tic-Tac-Toe. I would call it “Noughts and Crosses”, except the limitations of the graphical commands available meant I couldn’t do crosses. So, I will show you the source code needed to run this game, and warn you of the difficulties you will encounter if you try my bizarre way of doing graphics in Groovy.

There was once a recruitment campaign by Google which involved putting this mysterious message on billboards:

{ first 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e } . com

which many people solved and it lead them to a website and down a rabbit hole further testing their abilities. I had a go at this question myself and did manage to find the answer, but I didn’t record the method I used. It definitely involved a long command I typed into a terminal window, but I have a feeling I “cheated” by using a semi-colon. What I mean is, my solution wasn’t technically a “one-liner”, and was therefore no more interesting than a solution written in any other language. While emailing a friend of mine recently, this puzzle came to mind, and I decided that I would see if I could write a one-line BASH script to generate the answer. I did manage to, but it’s a little bit scary, so I’ll share it with you and try to explain it in this blog post.