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

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Wed Feb 18 20:57:47 CET 2009


On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, marius schebella wrote:

> 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.

Do you know that this has been said several times about various new 
languages? Assembly language was believed to introduce computer 
programming to non-specialists. Fortran was believed to introduce computer 
programming to non-specialists. Cobol was believed to introduce... no, 
BASIC is apparently more BASIC because otherwise why would it be called 
like that? and then LOGO was apparently made for kids to learn. And so on. 
What about Smalltalk and Squeak? same thing.

So, what is so special about visual dataflow, that makes it deserve to 
be burdened by such ideals?

That said, I'm not very fond of declarations, but I don't think that it's 
an issue of programmers vs non-programmers, it's a matter of people who 
like to declare vs people who don't, and that's a quite different split. 
There are quite a lot of serious programming languages that avoid 
declarations as much as possible.

> 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.

Well, it would add a lot of useless lines to every patch and would 
eventually become a meaningless trace of how every programme was made, 
much like unused variable declarations can distract, confuse, waste time 
and take space in the mind.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec


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