The yin yang is three circle calls per half — radius/2 for the inner curves, the full radius for the outer boundary, radius/5 for the eye. The sequence and the heading management between them is where all the complexity lives.
completedBuilt 2025-01
Yin Yang
Twenty lines of pure Turtle Graphics — drawn the old school way, no AI, no shortcuts.
PythonTurtle Graphics
WHY IT EXISTS
I gave myself a simple constraint: no AI assistance, no autocomplete, just the official documentation and my own reasoning. What started as a small discipline exercise became something more clarifying. Working through each arc manually, mentally tracking the turtle's heading across three nested circles — forced a kind of attention I hadn't used in a while. I came away with more respect for the people who built things this way before any of these tools existed.
WHAT WAS HARD
Turtle Graphics is sequential and stateless in your mental model, you have to carry the turtle's orientation in your head across every move. Getting `begin_fill` and `end_fill` to nest correctly across multiple arcs, and then repositioning for the eye circles without drawing stray lines, required actually understanding the coordinate system rather than guessing and checking.
WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENTLY
Make it fully parameterised, dynamic size, colour palettes, animation speed. There's a generative art tool in here if you let the geometry vary. The bones are already clean enough.
Technical Notes
Repositioning the turtle for each eye circle without drawing a connecting line requires teleport() rather than goto(). A small thing, but you only know it exists if you read the docs rather than asking something to read them for you.
The endeavor of doing it the old school way was eye-opening and made me realise how profound and great people were at that time in the programming space. As I was tackling obstacles, I was gaining more perspective in terms of scope and overall awareness of the module I was using. It is truly fascinating that we are living in this age of AI; however, we are losing depth in whatever we are doing, which is taken care of by AI. It is a double-edged sword, and one cannot catch it when it is mid-air.