[PD] "object" or "class" in pdpedia

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Thu Sep 13 19:43:18 CEST 2007


On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Chris McCormick wrote:

> For example if someone is explaining about what externals are. That is a 
> good and every-day intuitive use of the word "class" for normal people 
> as well as being acceptable to us abnormal computer scientists (as Matju 
> pointed out already).

I wouldn't quite describe myself as a computer scientist. I'm nowadays 
somewhat at odds with the computer scientist mentality. Neither could you 
really say that I'm not an artist: even though I only work on other 
people's projects, I still end up making artistic decisions.

Pd tends to attract people from the artist-programmer continuum. I don't 
think that it's useful to rely on stereotyping those people into two 
opposing clusters... People in the middle of the spectrum shouldn't have 
to decide whether they're an artist or a programmer.

When teaching pd, a more important "fault line" when trying to 
compartmentalise information and vocabulary, is whether a concept or word 
is of exclusive usefulness to a certain activity (e.g. such as programming 
C externals). If you teach how to patch, you don't want to teach 
proxy-inlets vs float-inlets, because they don't appear at all at the 
level of patching; likewise, if you teach how to write C externals, you 
don't want to be explaining t_bindlist because that concept is only useful 
in the internals of pd. (well, actually, some externals *could* mess with 
that, but you're not supposed to). However, distinctions between t_pd, 
t_gobj, t_scalar and t_object can be useful in explaining the big picture 
of how pd works, because each of them corresponds to a specific concept 
that you encounter in pd as "just a user". Some kinds of 
implementation-hiding are pointless...

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


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