On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
i used [pix_sig2pix~] as an example about how categories often fail. it was the first object that came to my mind that clearly belongs into several categories at the same time. there are other objects (within zexy, vanilla, list-abs, creb, you-name-it) that are not simply "glue" or "math", but both and more. and this is not necessarily a design problem of these objects (though sometimes it might well be).
I agree: see also:
http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2007-07/051652.html http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2007-07/051659.html http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2007-07/051768.html ... and more mails in that thread.
fortunately loads of object do belong to a simple category, so don't let Gödel stop us from trying to define such categories.
What's Gödel have to do with it at all?
(I don't necessarily agree with the rest of your mail.)
otoh, the object interface for doing complex-math in signal-domain might look significantly different than the one in message-domain, or image-domain, or matrix-domain. so, not all objects doing complex-maths (in various domains) should go into the same category "complex-math"
as much as possible, interfaces that are not the same about things that are, should be transformable by a function that takes an interfaces and turns it into another interface. This is so that people can guess how a class works, from the knowledge of how a similar class works. It can save on the amount of help files too. Ideally, we'd save on the number of classes, though.
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