On Mon, 2016-06-27 at 18:44 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
I do agree on this point about their convenience and everything. I pointed I do offer abstractions for that matter. Though I do maintain the personal and humble opinion that I'd rather see a multislider external in this case. Mostly because I don't feel like installing 10 external libraries just so I can check it.
Valid point. I guess nobody is seeing an advantage in having an abstraction depending on many externals over an external not depending on anything. The general "pro-abstraction" notion does probably focus more on vanilla-only abstractions (or abstractions as part of a library): They _are_ more portable as they do not need to be compiled for several platforms, they _are_ more educative for Pd users (especially those that call themselves 'not programmers, but musicians'), since they can be more easily inspected than externals. Those are facts and not a matter of preference.
I guess I wasn't clear when I said I'd love to see it as an external and included in some library - maybe I should have spent more time writing more than just a couple of lines. But my point was only that it'd be quite easier if it were the case where we could just see it just as an external included in some of the libraries you used - like cyclone...
I agree with you about the ease of libraries but still have the impression you think something can only be a library when it is compiled code, or am I wrong? I don't know where this notion comes from, but it is simply not true. I don't know if you have noticed, but zexy is a mixed library consisting of abstractions and externals (why should everything in it be externals?). list-abs is a library consisting only of abstractions. I don't see any reason why something couldn't be added to a library as abstraction. In the case of ph_msl the elimination of a lot of dependencies would be a valid reason for rewriting it as an external.
Now that I hopefully made myself clear, I wonder and ask; does anyeone disagree with that? Does anybody think it's a better thing that cyclone doesn't have a multislider object included right there and that maybe it's just better to have an abstraction that relies on the cyclone library and many more?
No, I believe most agree with you, at least I do. The discussion arose because you sounded like compiled externals should be _generally_ preferred which I still disagree with. In the end your own argument is "but as an external it would require less externals" - we're on the same track on this :-)
Roman