[PD-ot] could pd be the ideal software?

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Fri Jun 16 22:09:55 CEST 2006


On Jun 16, 2006, at 7:08 AM, Tim Blechmann wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 09:03 +0200, Torsten Anders wrote:
>>> I personally have been recently driven to make Pd a full-fledged
>>> programming language
>>
>> How do you define 'a full-fledged programming language'? What do you
>> miss in PD? And why do you feel uncomfortable with existing
>> programming
>> languages you may describe as 'full-fledged' so you need to beef up
>> PD?
>>
>> I am in general very sceptical whether visual programming languages
>> scale up for complex tasks (e.g. which visual programming language is
>> defined largely in itself -- as e.g. Lisp or SmallTalk usually are)
>> but
>> I would be very interested if someone can show me otherwise.
>
> dataflow languages are very good to model data streams such as dsp
> graphs or message streams (like sensor data), so it's very  
> reasonable to
> use a dataflow model for an audio programming language for projects of
> any size ....
>
> but the weakness is the control logic and data manipulation. the
> expressive power of written programming languages is much bigger in
> these aspects, not mentioning the debugging techniques.

That is a matter of opinion, not fact.  Many people find it to be  
quite the opposite.  Many things relating to control and data  
manipulation are trivial for me in Pd but take me much longer when I  
have to think procedurally.

Now consider the amount of human-hours spent on developing prodecural  
and/or object-oriented languages, techniques, debugging tools, etc.   
Compare that to the amount of human-hours spent on visual programming  
languages.  Its miniscule in comparison.  So given that, I think that  
dataflow languages stand up quite well.

.hc

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