You can contact me via email at patchouli@daviecooley.com or, if you happen to be a MeFite, through MeFi Mail to user TwoToneRow. Don't bother looking for me on FaceBook or Twitter, etc, -- I'm not there.

Early on, I tried to give each algorithm a descriptive name. Then, whenever I let someone watch it run, they would say, "It reminds me more of <Some Other Thing>", then the next person that watched it would say, "no, it's more like <Yet Another Different Thing Altogether>", so I gave up on descriptive titles.

I considered just numbering them as Algo1, Algo2, etc, but that seemed stupid so I considered different lists of named things, and finally settled on the list of elements in the Periodic Table. There's no rhyme or reason as why I picked any particular element name -- I just chose them more or less at random.

Plain ANSI C, cause I'm kind of a dinosaur. I've been doing programmming since the early 80's and have worked with (and taught courses in) a slew of different languages including some that get referred to as "modern", but it's plain old C that feels like a native language to me -- it's the one that I dream in at night (sometimes I have dreams in C++ as well, but those are usually nightmares).

A couple of years, more or less, working in fits and starts (I had quite a lot of stuff happening in my life over the time that I was working on this, so there were lots more fits than starts.) It was time well spent, though -- I'm really happy with the results, and I've learned a lot in the process.

I Love Processing. Casey Reas and Ben Fry are both gods in my opinion. You're right that these algorithms could absolutely have been done using Processing, so in a sense I have reinvented that wheel somewhat.

However, unlike Processing, this wheel of mine runs really, really quickly on a Raspberry PI -- some of the Patchouli algorithms even have to throttle themselves back to keep stuff from happening too quickly to even register on screen. In contrast, Processing sketches, being saddled with having to run on top of Java, are painfully slow on RPis.

Patchouli Project code is not a C port of Processing. Processing served as an inspiration for the development of my code in some ways, but it did not serve as a model for it at all. A programmer fluent in Processing would find little or no similarities in the two programming paradigms.

And besides, I enjoy reinventing wheels -- you should see my collection!

Nope. If I did, everyone would hate it. The Patchouli Project has always been a personal programming quest that I took on to satisfy my own curiosity, and I never gave any thought during its development as to how others would use it. As a result, the final code is, to put it gently, quirky, like a piece of furniture made specifically for one particular, severely misshapen person. It fits me just right, but trust me, you wouldn't be comfortable in it at all.

Because it spoils the experience. Watching the patterns and designs that constantly emerge only to disappear as they continue to evolve into something new is what makes the program truly enjoyable. Not to get too philosophical, but it's like LIFE -- Individual moments of beauty are more precious when they're ephemeral, because they're ephemeral, actually. Think "the moving finger writes, then moves on", or "like tears in the rain", etc.