[PD] better tabread4~

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Matt Barber wrote:

>> [tabread_tweak~]
>> [tabread_transpose~]
> I really hate to be a fart on this one

You should love it, if you intend it for the good of pd.

> 2)  I tend to greatly prefer object names which say what the object
> "does," not what it is "for,"

This is one of the major points of the DIY movement.

I'm sure that there are men who buy themselves «bikini line trimmers» in 
pink boxes labelled «designed exclusively for women» just so that they can 
have more precision tailoring themselves a chin pinch, and this doesn't 
have anything to do with being gay or effeminate, though the peer pressure 
wouldn't miss making that kind of allusion or another of the same level. 
Some other people would use the same bikini line trimmer to perform 
intricate pruning on bonsaï trees.

(doesn't anyone feel embarrassed that someone talks about a bikini line 
trimmer on pd-list? does it make me pervert, gay, or just oblivious to 
social customs? doesn't that exactly prove our point? consider the object 
for what it can do.)

> especially with rather low-level objects.  IMO, the latter labeling 
> tends to constrain one's thinking about the use of an object in a way 
> that the former does not.

I'd say that beyond "what it does" and "what it's for", there is also 
"what it's marketed as" or "what you will be told that it's for", which 
might be the same as "what it's for", but modified and specialised to make 
it more obviously relevant to people's life.

A major schism in the pd world is how GEM/PDP feel somewhat more "what 
it's for" than pd itself, whereas GF and pd are more "what it does". This 
is about both the naming and how an object's multipurposeness is only 
multiple ways of thinking about what is the single thing that the object 
does, rather than have multipurposeness correspond to multiple behaviours 
defined separately, each matching a single "what it's for".

This is a gross generalisation. There are definitely GEM/PDP classes that 
were designed in a "what it does" way, and GF classes that are definitely 
"what it's for" in style, but when asking yourself the question of why 
something is different in GF than in [pix_...], that kind of difference is 
often the most important difference.

> All of that said, I think something like the [sampler~] object proposed 
> in another post would be much in keeping with the "user-friendly" filter 
> objects like [bp~] (as opposed to [rpole~] and [rzero~] which are the 
> real "building block" kinds of filter classes).

I consider [lop~] to be on essentially the same level as [rpole~], really. 
[rpole~] is simply a different kind of building block that appeals more to 
people who work in terms of so-called «transfer functions».

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