I've been playing around with learning some javascript just recently, and came up with this little sample program:
Hat recipe program
The program lets you choose a collection of parameters, and then generates a hat pattern to those specifications. The hat itself is very basic -- it's a beanie-type with a ribbed brim and circular shaping at the crown -- it's probably the simplest thing you can knit with any shaping to it at all, so you're unlikely to want to actually knit from this.
Still, I'm interested in this approach to knitting patterns -- if it were easy to write more complicated patterns in this way, you could make them accessible not just in a range of sizes, but in any size anyone cared to knit. You could also provide other customisation, say to fit different body shapes, or just to add variety. And you would never have to worry about yarn substitution, because the pattern would be tailored to your yarn and tension.
Of course this isn't a totally new idea -- there is commercial software which does similar things, and the KnitML project aims to provide a common language to allow this to work. So yeah, I'm quite excited about the potential here to change out whole approach to knitting patterns!
...but this is really just a tangent, and I'm just enjoying playing with javascript :o)
Hugh.
