On Sun, 5 Apr 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Mon, 4/6/09, Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca wrote:
Oh I see. But that notation is only standard in shell languages and is not going to help someone guess the name of the object or what it does, especially if they are not used to english. You could name [or] just [o] for example...a saving of one letter in exchange for an infinite increase in uncertainty. It would contribute to making Pd a secret language for initiates who bang until.
Are you saying that initiates would know a secret way to bang until that does not cause Pd to freeze?
It's all about users who don't want to read helpfiles and refuse to learn anything and whose opinion is still important, I don't know why.
Or, that an infinite increase in uncertainty would dull the users' senses so much that they could no longer tell the difference between an operational and frozen patch?
You have to question the infinite increase in uncertainty. Why was this said? is Martin assuming [o] to be an abbreviation for every possible current or future word that may start by [o] ? And somehow at once the user can't possibly be bothered to open the help file to figure what "o" means.
Pd is already a secret language for initiates. Even your hypothetical beginner is required to guess the name and functionality of what should be a standard object. But I imagine the work everyone is doing on organizing libraries by category will go a long way towards remedying that.
A system of mutually-exclusive categories is not very hyperlinked... multiple tags per class is a way that is a lot more helpful in getting people to find what they need, as there is usually more than one useful tag to put on a class, and a system of mutually-exclusive categories only allows one such word at the expense of others.
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