One area that patcher languages really do well in is rapid prototyping.
With Pd you can whip out a working prototype really quickly, but they
generally it'll be really whack and hard to follow or modify. One
thing patcher languages are not so good at is managing complexity.
Large programs seem to get crazy and unmanagable relatively easily.
This leads me to an interesting paradox about programming that has
stuck with me since 1993 when I was taking Computer Science in college.
Some famous computer scientist (I forget exactly who) said "you have
to write the program in order to know how to write the program."
I have found that this actually makes a lot of sense, so when
programming with Pd, first I try to whip out a working prototype, then
start again from scratch and build it the way it should be done, with
things nicely modularized into objects (abstractions generally).
It would be great if we could gather this info into a common page.
There are a massive amount of books about programming techniques for
procedural and object oriented languages, but there is basically
nothing about programming techniques for patcher languages, even though
they have been around for 20+ years and are decently widespread in use.
.hc