[PD] a multislider GUI as abstraction

[Roman Haefeli]

On Mon, 2016-06-27 at 18:44 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> 
> I do agree on this point about their convenience and everything. I
> pointed I do offer abstractions for that matter. Though I do maintain
> the personal and humble opinion that I'd rather see a multislider
> external in this case. Mostly because I don't feel like installing 10
> external libraries just so I can check it.

Valid point. I guess nobody is seeing an advantage in having an
abstraction depending on many externals over an external not depending
on anything. The general "pro-abstraction" notion does probably focus
more on vanilla-only abstractions (or abstractions as part of a
library): They _are_ more portable as they do not need to be compiled
for several platforms, they _are_ more educative for Pd users
(especially those that call themselves 'not programmers, but
musicians'), since they can be more easily inspected than externals.
Those are facts and not a matter of preference.

> 
> I guess I wasn't clear when I said I'd love to see it as an external
> and included in some library - maybe I should have spent more time
> writing more than just a couple of lines. But my point was only that
> it'd be quite easier if it were the case where we could just see it
> just as an external included in some of the libraries you used - like
> cyclone...

I agree with you about the ease of libraries but still have the
impression you think something can only be a library when it is
compiled code, or am I wrong? I don't know where this notion comes
from, but it is simply not true. I don't know if you have noticed, but
zexy is a mixed library consisting of abstractions and externals (why
should everything in it be externals?). list-abs is a library
consisting only of abstractions. I don't see any reason why something
couldn't be added to a library as abstraction. In the case of ph_msl
the elimination of a lot of dependencies would be a valid reason for
rewriting it as an external.

> Now that I hopefully made myself clear, I wonder and ask; does
> anyeone disagree with that? Does anybody think it's a better thing
> that cyclone doesn't have a multislider object included right there
> and that maybe it's just better to have an abstraction that relies on
> the cyclone library and many more?

No, I believe most agree with you, at least I do. The discussion arose
because you sounded like compiled externals should be _generally_
preferred which I still disagree with. In the end your own argument is
"but as an external it would require less externals" - we're on the
same track on this :-)

Roman

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