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

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Fri Jun 16 22:20:17 CEST 2006


On Jun 16, 2006, at 3:03 AM, Torsten Anders wrote:

>
> On 16.06.2006, at 07:19, Hans-Christoph Steiner 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 miss visual programming when using other languages.  A decent  
programming environment should be able to do whatever its users' want  
it to do.  Why are the python people reimplementing all these APIs in  
python when they already exist in Perl?  Why did the perl hackers  
reimplement all these APIs when they already exist in C?  Its the  
same question.

> 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.

Pd has some fundamental design issues that will prevent it from  
becoming a general purpose language.  String handling is a major  
issue, for example, and the symbol/list weirdness.  You might be  
interested in looking at netpd.  They implemented version control,  
textfile parsing, and network distribution and management of files  
all in Pd.  Seeing that really made me think that Pd could be a   
general purpose programming language.

.hc

>
> Best,
> Torsten
>
> --
> Torsten Anders
> Sonic Arts Research Centre • Queen's University Belfast
> Frankstr. 49 • D-50996 Köln
> Tel: +49-221-3980750
> www.torsten-anders.de
> strasheela.sourceforge.net
>
>
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