On 04/03/2014 05:42 PM, Roman Haefeli wrote:
On Don, 2014-04-03 at 17:33 -0400, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
So yes, it's rather extreme of me to advise users to just use global
symbols and switch languages when they run into problems. But I think
there's an assumption on this list that most users know enough about
other programming languages to judge for themselves the level of
expressiveness in Pd. I don't think that's true, and I think it's
important to remind people just how clunky Pd is in these respects
compared to other modern languages.
Clunky or not, Pd is the language I feel the most expressive with. YMMV.
Sorry, I'm not using the best terminology here. I'm talking about the
practical expressivity of the language.
For just one example-- let's say you wanted to make a polyphonic patch
with 30 oscillators, and send them messages to set initial frequency and
amplitude. Let's use "Old-school Pd" which doesn't have abstractions.
You make a subpatch, get it the way you want it, copy it, then paste it
29 times. Now when you need to make changes to the subpatch, you need
to delete the other 29, copy the one you changed and paste it 29 times.
That sucks.
Now let's look at "New-school Pd" which has abstractions. In this case
you get your abstraction the way you want it, instantiate it on a
canvas, copy it, and paste it 29 times. Now when you want to make a
change to the abstraction, you click "Save" and Pd automatically pushes
your changes to all instances of your abstraction. You don't have to
copy/paste everything again. That's very simple, but it's one of the
ways abstractions can make Pd more expressive.
So you can express yourself by programming in either version of the
language. But the "New-school" version makes it easier to do that. That
may be clearer with the example of abstractions-- which you no doubt use
all the time-- than with examples of scope that don't rely on $0. But
that's why I refer to other modern languages which don't suffer from
that roadblock.
-Jonathan
Roman
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