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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> 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.

Can you give some examples of how other langauges handle this kind of  
thing without delcarations?

.hc

>> 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.
>
> _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec



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