[PD-dev] Re: pure devil (fwd)

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Tim Blechmann wrote:

> hm ... although i'm not really fan of cathedral building, maybe it would
> be a good idea to write down some kind of language specification and a
> list of requests.

I'd warn about taking "The Cathedral and the Buzzword" too seriously.

I think it's important to distinguish between libertarian wishful-thinking 
and what is required to get people organised.

I'm really not against more organisation than what we have now: it's just 
I haven't gotten to that point yet.

> basically i'm thinking of splitting up pd's messaging and dsp core from
> the rest ... still thinking about how ...

This part is easy. Make every patcher-related feature scriptable in a way 
that you'd find comfortable to use for making self-modifying patches (or 
other forms of patches-generating-patches).

Then all those features would be available from the GUI through a 
[netsend]/[netreceive] pair from a process that we call the client.

> and what's part of pd's language and what of pd's library ...

Yeah... and if I were you I'd also look at ways to make more non-object
things become objects or classes: for example, Jack support could be a
library containing [adc~] and [dac~], and so would OSS support and ALSA
support. As with the above canvas stuff, the big advantage of making 
something a real Pd object is that you can talk to it using Pd messages 
and atoms through its inlets, which is the *only* requirement for enabling 
that thing to be used from a patch.

____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada