[PD] Idiomatic Pd

Thomas Mayer thomas at dergrossebruder.org
Tue Jul 29 21:53:27 CEST 2008


Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> On Jul 29, 2008, at 2:04 PM, Frank Barknecht wrote:
>> I really cannot see where you got the impression that I'm squelching
>> Luke's suggestion, when I briefly expressed a certain personal
>> scepticism regarding style guides in two sentences of currently three
>> much longer mails in this thread, which I considered to be  
>> constructive,
>> at least as brainstorming fodder or to give some motivations on how  
>> and
>> why my personal style evolved the way it did.
> 
>  From this sentence:
> 
> "I'm not too much in favour of a style "guide" however. Let people be  
> creative."
> 
> Maybe I overreacted. I think there is a lot of negative tone on this  
> list, I am sure I have contributed to that as well.  I think we  
> should encourage people to try things more than telling them its  
> wrong before they have started.
> 
> Or maybe I'm just a fucking hippie... "peace 'n' love dude!"

Although I am more or less just a lurker on this list, and sometimes an
asker of stupid questions, not to mention a person with too messy
patches, I find the idea of a style guide very good, and here is my
reasoning:

As most of us Pd users think of Pd as a programming language, then Pd
should have one or more style guides just as any other programming
language, so other people's patches (read: source code) are easy to read
to you. You do not need to have a definite style guide, just as there
are several indent styles for functional programming languages, there
may be several styles for Pd programming, but guidelines for newbies are
a Good Thing (tm), as you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Just my two cents,
Thomas
-- 
"Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police
are effective. They're a kind of job insurance."
(Leto II. in: Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune)
http://thomas.dergrossebruder.org/




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