Le 2012-03-09 à 19:58:00, András Murányi a écrit :

Then they have a certain "high end", the more advanced topics within - e.g. dynamic patching for me, or libPd according to Julian. Now, someone can fear that the focus of developments could move towards the "high end", leaving simple folks increasingly frustrated.

Many projects are driven by the high-end. It's necessary. They're also driven by the high-end. Many low-end features start existing because high-end features first allowed them to exist. If someone makes an easy-to-use polyphonic synth, this synth might be using dynamic-patching features, perhaps new ones or new ways of using the old ones. This needs high-end development. In projects like Pd, development has always to be multi-focus.

It isn't just that. Even in the case of unrelated features, high-end features are what keeps the high-end users around, and they're the ones who write externals and abstractions, both for themselves and for others. Low-end users don't produce nearly as much low-end abstractions and externals as high-end users do.

It's that the very ability to figure out what should go in a given abstr/extern, and what should be left out, and all the strategies of how to specify args, etc., those are all skills that are characteristics of high-end users. Every such skill moves you towards the higher-end.

At some point I had to realise that I couldn't just ask students to make abstractions... I mean that I couldn't just teach them the mechanics of $1 arguments and $0-foo local variables. They still haven't thought about how to figure out which ideas should become abstractions and which shouldn't, etc. ; they'd need something of the order of « Introduction to programming », perhaps several semesters, but I remember that in university, after the 4th such course, students only began to figure out what could be a good library vs a bad one. So, definitely, Pd users who didn't go through the equivalent of those courses (or of some other related courses) rarely would publish a library that other people would want to use. So, it's important that high-end users keep on making low-end components.

It's also that everybody needs to use some of those « low-end components »... there are lots of things common to all users. And even though high-end users can more easily tolerate design problems and bugs and various difficulties, they don't necessarily like them.

I don't share, but I think I can understand that fear, and my point was that Pd shall keep the "low end" accessible and up-to-date.

Actually, I wonder which features you have in mind when you say that.

Yea, this is what we call in our wonderfully expressive Hungarian language "szőrszálhasogatás" :o)  

What I mean about that, is that for making your point, saying full-time isn't simply a small exaggeration. Otherwise, I don't think I'd have made a fuss.