On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:19:35 -0500 (EST) Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
The idea of Vanilla-without-externals is probably most useful to ZenGarden users, who can't compile any existing externals, because ZenGarden was designed to be incompatible with Pd-Vanilla. It is because of this incompatibility, that Zengarden users are led to excessively focus on what's compatible with Vanilla-without-Externals, because that's all that the ZenGarden project aims to support.
Just another hypothesis. What do you think ?
I think you're right. This minimal set of features is designed from the outset. Martin and I spent some afternoons in the park discussing the idea of an axiomatic set of DSP operations, from which all other patches can be built. He was quite clear on that as a goal from the start. The sensitivity of sound to small changes in implementation has been on my mind from the start, so if you like the emphasis was on a reliably portable functional equivalence without code compatability. I have always taken this, perhaps presumptuously, as one of Miller's strong principles. Without it the slogan "The diagram is the program" fails, and one cannot use Pd to write books, teach or otherwise share datafow programs in a purely visual way. The commercial advantages too, as the RjDj project benefitted from and upheld, are ease of maintenance and widespread compatability across diverse hardware.
Pd-Extended and the ecology of externals is an overlapping but different space, marvelous in its own ways, but for projects like defining a portable markup standard for reactive music, or creating a new standard "middle layer" in game audio, then the more robust and limited the basic unit gen set is the better.
Andy