On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, João Pais wrote:
Curious. I make complex patches and I prefer that people would edit them.
What's surprising? That different people have different wishes about how their own work gets used?
Nah, I expect that people have different wishes. It's not really surprising, I was kidding in some way, but I thought that the opposition was worth making, that's all, especially as there was no explanation about how complexity ties into the rest of the argument. One can guess, but there's value in hearing in explicitly from the original speaker.
I think you got my intentions/feelings the best. It's not a "complex" patch because I'm such a crafty guy and want to show off, it's a complex patch because it's a mature tool with many features (in it's own small field).
Ah, I wouldn't automatically know that. It tends to be more subtle than that. The patches I use to show off, can also be patches that I use for teaching, or as starting points for making more complex patches, or as many-featured tools, ... sometimes all four in the same day. I also feel that the strongest incentives are when there are multiple goals that can be achieved with one piece of work. The meaning of "complex" is quite complex by itself.
About the "generous sharing spirit", as I said, the patch is (for almost a year now) free to download in my Pd page for everyone. The patch has already reached a mature state, maybe a 0.9 version,
What I found out about version numbers is that 0.9 is as meaningful as 9.0. That is, expectations about version numbers are so radically different from context to context. If you think Pd 0.43 is going to be quite more featureful than Pd 0.42, you can't apply that to your general impression of a 0.9 version or vice-versa. I mean, one think I learned about computers, is that out-of-context version numbers are a LOT LESS informative than they look like and than what people think they are.
[a small parenthesis: when I present this patch to musicians, they find it excellent, and they ask why don't I commercialise it and make profit. since it was Pd in the first place who let me write the patch, I prefer to make it available for free]
Tcl/Tk is also free software, since its very beginnings, and has been used for writing plenty of proprietary code from the very beginning. There are subcultures in which people more readily think like what you're saying now, and there are some for which the openness of the language tools is unrelated to people's license decisions.
with a nice interface (which Tcl/Tk can't do),
Tcl/Tk has been used for making nice interfaces of commercial apps throughout the nineties. You didn't see them because most of them were industrial. But nowadays, there are people who are using cool apps and have no idea that there's Tcl/Tk inside, and often it's because when it looks cool, it doesn't look like it's really Tcl/Tk anymore.
And finally, Pd-vanilla insists on supporting Tcl/Tk versions of ten years ago, and on not supporting Tcl/Tk versions of now, and only uses them with the default look, and the default look doesn't look like 2010.
So, I say, though there are lots of wrong things about Tcl/Tk, there are also lots of things said about Tcl/Tk that are wrong.
(the rest of the reply will come later. gotta go to work now.)
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801