[PD] style guide idea: [send foo] versus [; foo(

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
>> Btw, it's in pd/doc/2.control.examples/10.more.messages.pd , and I'd have
>> trouble considering anything in that folder as being non-basic.
> I must say, when thinking about the time when I learned Pd that there is a lot
> to swallow at the beginning. I never could attend a workshop, so I learned by
> doing Pd, reading stuff and from help on this list. Now it's easier as there
> are many workshops all over, but I guess the "old timers" like me or Hans all
> learned Pd without a teacher.

Well, I all learned without a teacher either... but then I had a strange 
path. In my first encounter with Pd, I started trying to port a large 
external library. Then a year later, I started trying Pd itself a bit. 
Then the following year I started reading the source code. And then I 
realised that I should really force myself to read the manual a bit. It 
makes it harder to relate to students for sure.

Well, I don't think it's an all-or-nothing proposition. Section 2 is not 
there as something that must be finished learning before going somewhere 
else. Everybody will yawn at one part or another of that section, and 
eventually they figure out that they have to refresh themselves a bit.

It's much easier to remember things that you can imagine having a use for, 
and so if you can't, then you need to develop that imagination so that you 
can help yourself remember more. (this is yet another example of why I 
needed to escape the math dept)

> And 2.control.examples is not as much fun as 3.audio.examples,

This is something that I hardly notice, as a programming languages theory 
enthusiast... even though pd is full of holes, it's so much different from 
everything else, that there's much that can be said about it and thought 
about it. And then my personal interest in music composition faded not 
long before I started to use Pd, and I've never quite been able to 
reconnect the two... so, that tends to tip the balance in direction of 
section 2... but I know what you mean. When I started a degree in computer 
programming, I couldn't understand why so few people thought it could be a 
good idea to learn programming by generating graphics.

> But what I did was simple: I read all the docs over and over. Again and again,
> and repeated that once every year at least.

I should have read this part of your mail before replying above. I'm kinda 
repeating you.

> Just like Hans it took me a while to understand the concept behind 
> semicolon senders and how they are equivalent to [s something] and how 
> ";pd dsp" is the same as [s pd] ... But once I got that, it opened up 
> all kinds of neat patching tricks and made certain things much easier to 
> do and to understand that I was struggling with before.

It's not just that, it's also how that semicolon relates to the semicolons 
in [netsend], [qlist], the .pd file format, and dynamic patching. It all 
fits together.

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