I had a look at George Stiny's "Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing" book (MIT Press, 2006) which is freely available on the web [1]. The introduction is very waffly ... his analysis of shape strikes me as what Euclid('s predecessors) did a long time ago in figuring out what geometry should talk about. Combining primitive images/shapes algebraically was explored by Henderson in the early 1980s [2] and many others; SICP too IIRC.

Has anyone used this stuff (shape grammars) in anger? Any pointers to a system that works on current platforms that is worth playing with?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140105105101/http://shapetalki...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800068.802148