On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 02:42:12PM +0100, matteo sisti sette wrote:
Yes of course. I didn't mean to criticize your suggestion: I meant to "criticize PD" that makes that suggestion necessary.
Of course that IS a valid workaround in a lot of situations where the use of abstractions is not very extensive; it is just not feasible when you're developing some complex large scale application that you need also to mantain or further develop in the future.
Here are some other reasons why you might not want to use Pd to develop a large scale application (and why I won't call Pd a 'programming language'):
- No hash/map/table type, or array type that holds anything except floats.
- No strings.
- No introspection.
- Dynamic patching is unsupported, hacky, and occasionally buggy.
- Audio processing is hard coded into it instead of being supported by the
core language as a library like in 99% of other programming languages.
- It's not easily portable to embedded systems without many modifications.
- Inconsistencies in the syntax as discussed many times on this list
before.
- Lacking some other useful programming constructs.
It's great to use Pd for what it totally rocks at: making interesting graphics and music, but I wouldn't encourage it to be used as a general purpose programming language, because it simply isn't good enough at that job.
There have been [code] patches submitted in the past to rectify some of the above points, but Miller doesn't seem to be interested in turning Pd into a general purpose programming language, which is probably a good idea since it's so good at what it does already, and doing that might ruin it completely.
Long live Pd, the greatest and most fun audio visual mangling tool I know of!
Best,
Chris.