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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

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

> If you want to call writing objects a shortcut, that's fine.  But that's
> the basis of programming in Pd.  Specifically, I mean that the # args
> are a shortcut to avoid patching something in Pd.

Hmm, abstractions are also a shortcut to avoid patching something in Pd...

More generally, nowadays, most of the effort of writing code is about
avoiding to write more code.

I think the debate is more about which shortcuts pay off and which don't.  

For example, most shortcuts in Perl only pay off if you write
text-processing one-liners like people did when Perl was only seen as a
replacement for the AWK language. Nowadays, Perl5 is used as an extremely
general-purpose language, and for most of the typical situations of use of
Perl5, those shortcuts are useless are may be seen as warts, especially as
some sorely needed general-purpose shortcuts never ever came to Perl5 in
all of the last decade.

Contrast this with Ruby. Most shortcuts in Ruby pay off no matter the kind 
of programming you do. For me that was an important reason to switch from 
Perl5 to Ruby.

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