L-systems perfectly illustrate how massive visual complexity can be mathematically derived from a handful of discrete axioms.

It’s a core mental model. When building generative systems, the designer's job fundamentally shifts from manually drawing the final shape to strictly engineering the initial recursive rules. A design system that cannot be expressed as a recursive function is usually just arbitrary styling, not a true system.

For the computational linguistics aficionados: L-systems are context-free grammars by another name.