Roman Haefeli wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 11:24 +0100, marius schebella wrote:
hey hans,
if it's called "extended" and you strip it down to the bare bones, then where's the extended part?
i think, noone wanted to strip down anything. this is only about not loading the whole bunch of libs automatically anymore. how does that make pd-extended less 'extended'?
first, I think there is a difference between a "user" user (who downloads a patch) and a "patching" user. I always saw pd-extended as a consensual (ok, proposed actually by only one person) agreement on a set of object classes that are available in addition to pd vanilla. It was a way to make sure that if a "patcher" programs a patch for pd-extended that every other pd-extended "user" will have the same setup and thus be able to open the patch without errors. if you leave the loading of external(librarie)s to the user user, that means, if you allow/force the user to create his/her own order of startup libs, you cannot count on this behaviour anymore.
eventually, I think users should not have to bother with namespaces at all. I still consider namespace declarations in a visual dataflow programming tool to be a hack.
can you elaborate that a bit? to me it looks perfectly normal, that i have to at least call the tools, that i am going to use.
ok. this is a problem of software architecture. where to draw the border between what is "given" and what is open. to me object classes should be part of the given world, because one, it makes coding, teaching, deploying easier, if all patchers were using the same set of tools and two, if you create your own screws, then you also have to ship the screw drivers (not only declare them).
I know the pd concept is, not to insist on a predefined set of object classes, which of course makes pd more extendible, but with this huge overhead of having to hassle with declarations, namespaces, which are ok for written programming languages, but maybe not for a building block programming tool like pd.
especially if - like in the case of the pd externals - the libraries are arbitrary. (like any categorization system). they are not sorted by topics but rather by coders. just think, a new pd patcher has to learn that an object was programmed by IOhannes, and therefor it is in the zexy library. another one was programmed by someone at the IEM, therefore it is part of the iemlib. furthermore the name of the libraries can change, the same code can become part of two different libraries and some objects do not even belong to a library. if you are consequent in providing your tools, it means that you have to ship the particular pd externals together with your patch everytime you want to share a patch. because then referring to zexy is not enough either, someone else could create a concurring external library also called zexy. then what...
plus, not agreeing on the toolset (set of object names) will always cause your own abstractions to be potentially overwritten by internal/external object classes, which get loaded instead.
plus, with some objects it is necessary to load them in advance, for example all objects with abbreviations, or some objects that enable special features (like the loader for luascripts).
pd is *not* like c, c++, java, these languages create applications, but the way I would like to see pd is, that pd programmers don't create standalone pd versions, but only pd patches.
plus, don't expect (pd-x) patchers ever to declare all objectclasses that they're using.
I hate to say this, but standards and specifications can really make life easier. the habit to leave many things opens allows people to addon a lot of crazy stuff, but it is counterproductive from the viewpoint of patch sharing.
marius.