Lambda the Ultimate

This is an example of one of the simpler classes of Lindenmayer systems. However, the graphics output quality is quite good! At first glance it appears that this is a result of a different choice for graphics primitives.

It's too bad that they don't have PDF output as an option.

First, I don't think it is a contest - There's plenty of room for both L-systems and CFDG, since neither is a proper superset of the other.

Now, L-Systems in general are rather abstract and could be construed to encompass a lot of things. But, as generally implemented, L-Systems and CFDG have at least one significant difference: In L-Systems, the terminals are commands to turtle graphics, and the fundamental drawing operation is to generate a line or tree (usually fractal.) In CFDG, the terminals are shape primitives (circle or square).

I'm not sure of the theoretic relationship between these approaches, but on a practical level, this means that L-Systems always draw a rather direct representation of the expansion tree, whereas you have the freedom in CFDG to shroud the scaffolding, as it were. My experience is that they produce different classes of images, at least in an artistic sense.

While I've found many gorgeous things drawn with L-Systems - they are almost always in conjunction with one or more other 3D modeling techniques. What I liked about CFDG (and drove to me to create Context Free), was that just this very simple system alone produced very lovely results, with relatively easy rules. Furthermore, it has that hard to define quality of "tweak-ability" - which makes one want to try just one more little modification to the rules again and again!

CFGs can be used for all sorts of combinatorial structures. See the work of Flajolet and Salvy to see how they can be generated (uniformly and also randomly), enumerated, counted, etc.