[PD-dev] $0 in messages, was: multiple $arg-expansion

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sat Jan 21 21:03:37 CET 2006


On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Programming with Pd is done with connecting objects and message boxes,
> so I think that we should stay true to this instead of making shortcuts
> which are more suited to a text language.

How much is Pd supposed to be a non-text language? It's already much more
textish than a bunch of existing dataflow tools (GStreamer, OmSynth,
BuzzTracker, ...)

> Much if not most of this problem was caused by the shortcut of allowing
> sets starting with a float to be lists.  So shortcuts can do real harm.

I don't think that shortcuts cause as much harm as the failure to teach 
them. It seems that most every course in Pd avoid to teach the real 
thing because somehow the students aren't programmers and it's supposed 
that they don't need to learn Pd that deeply and anyway Pd's own 
documentation doesn't necessarily go that deep.

> Having # and $ could cause new confusions for beginners and others, like
> forgetting when to use # and when to use $.  I think once people understand
> Pd's messaging, then it becomes much easier to read $ args.

In the debate between #,$ args and $-only args, what matters most is not
how easy it is to read a single arg; instead it is how easy it is to read
(and/or write) an arrangement of those args in a practical situation where
you have to get something done.

> Many aspects of programming are confusing to beginners, but they pay off
> in the long run.  I found the messaging in object oriented programming
> quite confusing when I started, functions seem more straightforward.

I've read many bad tutorials on OOP, and in the light of this I think it's
no wonder that people are confused about it. Lots of pop ontology, pop
epistemology, and broken hierarchies of animal species and geometric
shapes. The worst OOP tutorials are of course the ones that assert that
JAVA is pure OOP and that (even worse) pure OOP _is_ JAVA.



PS: in standard math, sets are assumed to be unordered unless specified
otherwise. Sometimes sets get extended with some comparison relation on
their elements (making them "ordered sets") but then they get given
special names:

  1. posets aka partially-ordered sets
  2. tosets aka   totally-ordered sets
  3. wosets aka      well-ordered sets aka sequences

both Pd messages and Pd lists can be considered finite sequences.

 _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada




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