[PD-dev] stripping down Pd-extended's default libs

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 17, 2009, at 5:54 PM, marius schebella wrote:

> Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, marius schebella wrote:
>>> eventually, I think users should not have to bother with  
>>> namespaces at all. I still consider namespace declarations in a  
>>> visual dataflow programming tool to be a hack.
>> So, why is it that it is a hack in the context of a visual dataflow  
>> programming language
>
> because I think the concept of a visual dataflow programming  
> language should be to provide a developer environment to people who  
> don't necessarily have a programming background. think of html code,  
> imagine you have to declare every h1, a, bold, ul... tag, before you  
> can use it. as a pd user I really don't want to go into that level  
> of complexity.

I have found in my teaching that [trigger] is a fair more complex  
thing to understand than import.  [trigger] has to be explained at  
length, often repeatly.  On the other hand, when students have tried  
to use objects from libraries and found those object didn't work, two  
sentences is usually enough: "that's because that object is in a  
library that isn't loaded.  To load it, create an object called  
[import libname]".

The hard part is the implementation, IMHO.  Ideally the implementation  
will make it really that easy.  It's half way there, but there are  
still some hard bits to sort out.

For a related reason,  I also like [import] over [declare].  [declare]  
has those four flags which even I can never remember which does what,  
plus it is new syntax, there are few objects that have -args in them.  
[import] loads a library in the way that it should be the vast  
majority of the time: into the canvas-local namespace.

.hc

>> and, I presume that you mean that non-visual and/or non-dataflow  
>> programming languages are somehow different?
>
> most text based libraries either come with a fixed set of libraries  
> or ship the library with the code, or ship a binary. as a pd  
> programmer I only want to ship patches and abstractions. (and  
> content like pics etc....).
>
>> I'd say that declarations are annoying in any language, and fully- 
>> qualified names are annoying in any language, but with some  
>> languages and editors it's easier to handle it than in some others,  
>> and in some it annoys more than in others.
>
> I am sure this would be less of a problem, if the current setup (pd  
> version, library version, startup settings) would just automatically  
> be added to every patch. although... nah, maybe this is not a good  
> solution.
>
>> Do you mean namespace declarations in particular, or namespaces in  
>> general including full-qualified names, or do you just mean the  
>> latter, or just long names in general?
>
> namespaces in particular with pd. not in general.
>
> cheers,
> marius.



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