> 3. Its visual austerity is a huge help to me in thinking clearly about
> patching and dataflow. It's amazing how often a geometrically elegant
> solution turns out to be an elegant solution full stop.
Coincidentally, I was thinking about counterexamples to this today.
Consider a gate:
float|v-----o <- gate!|v(copy of) float
One of the problems with C is that you must take care both in your conditions
for
opening the gate, and in avoiding many subtle bugs through spacing, scoping,
etc.
that could cause the gate to become ineffectual. Many of those subtle bugs are
visual--
I mean, your variable's state is just waiting to be perused by any context
inside the
function that's willing to read it. It's amazing Linux works at all when you
consider
how few constraints there are on the code one must reason about.
A dataflow language improves this by representing the gate as a visual barrier.
You can't just blithely read "stuff" below the gate[1]. The gate has to pass
the data
down the line, and even if you made an additional connection from "float" to
something
below, you have to drag the line visually over the gate so that your violation
of
common sense and decency is visually obvious.
But now we have a problem, because if we have anything more than "float" that
we
want to operate on below the gate, we have no way to read it. There are two
possible
solutions to this:1) store copies of the data below the gate, so that you can
read
them if you happen to be allowed through the gate.2) send some more expressive
form of data like an object through the gate, and pack
everything you want to have access to into that object.
#1 is what I see in most patches (and what I end up patching when I just need
to get
something done). But think about how that complicates the dataflow. In the
gate
example it's especially apparent-- if you want to store some data below the
gate you
have to draw a line that does an end run around it to the right inlet of a
[float] below
the gate. That violates the very representation of a gate that the visual
language was
trying to provide for you.
#2 pack your data into a list and use [route] as the gate. This restores
visual clarity
at the expense of anonymous positional arguments. So it works well for routing
a list
of, say, two or three values. But not so well for a larger amount of discrete
data. An
example of this downside would be a patch that does a good job of showing where
a list flows or branches, but then seeing a big message box at the bottom with
something
like [voice $1-$3 $5 $2 $4(. It's a real pain to debug and extend patterns
like that.
I'd be interested to hear other approaches to this problem.
-Jonathan
On Wednesday, March 2, 2016 8:20 PM, Matt Barber <[email protected]>
wrote:
This is a great way to frame it, and it is indeed how I approach composition
as well. It sometimes helps to think of a piece as a solution – maybe the only
solution – to a set of constraints.
Three limitations that I love in Pd off the top of my head:
1. The relatively small set of core objects really helps with programming
ingenuity, and in fact has made me think through some things that have been
helpful in other programming contexts. I love when someone throws down a "this
can't be done in vanilla" challenge; I've learned lots from thinking, "OK,
we'll see about that!"
2. The smallish set of objects also means that Pd is not a black box. It does
mean sometimes that you have to know what you're doing, but in general it does
not force you to think a specific way about what you're doing. This is not true
in my experience with my students who use other programs excluding csound and
SC, but including Max – they'll often as a group settle on one massive object
or plugin that does 100 things in a really specific way (look at this badass
object I found!) and all end up writing more or less the same piece due to the
directions the design of the object pushed them in.
3. Its visual austerity is a huge help to me in thinking clearly about patching
and dataflow. It's amazing how often a geometrically elegant solution turns out
to be an elegant solution full stop.
On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Lorenzo Sutton <[email protected]> wrote:
Trying to turn the Pd limitations thread, which eventually became the (usual)
'Pd vs foo" thread, into something possibly more constructive, interesting and
inspiring.
Starting from the concept of "Creative Limitation" (I am primarily thinking of
Stravinsky):
How do Pd's limitations enhance people's creativity?
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