--- On Thu, 12/16/10, Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
From: Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx Subject: Re: [PD] PD OOP? To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: "PD List" pd-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, December 16, 2010, 8:32 AM On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 09:57:08PM -0800, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Thu, 12/16/10, Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx
wrote:
From: Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx Subject: Re: [PD] PD OOP? To: "Mathieu Bouchard" matju@artengine.ca Cc: "PD List" pd-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, December 16, 2010, 5:40 AM On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:23:24AM -0500, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
IMHO, directing your criticism at pd-vanilla
alone is
extremely
unproductive. You have to accept the fact
that doing
real work in Pd may
require a lot of externals. It's sad, but
it's like
that. I wouldn't use
Pd if it didn't have externals.
Some platforms that Pd patches run on support
very few
externals. If you want to run your patches on a wide variety of
platforms it is
rational to avoid externals in order to avoid expending a great
deal of extra
effort.
In many cases it is replaced by the effort required to
make
a hack to replace the functionality of the missing
external.
Yep. In my experience, the cost-benefit balance usually falls on the side of restricting myself to not using many externals, or hacking functionality back into abstractions, rather than trying to port externals to multiple platforms. You are welcome to spend your own time however you like.
In the cases where a Vanilla hack is not possible, you
are either forced to
use an external, or you arbitrarily restrict yourself
and shrug off the fact
that there is no rational way to get features into
Vanilla even if (everyone
- finds them useful/necessary.
I guess I view it in a different way. Pd-msp is a constrained software environment. I choose to match my patching style to those constraints so that I don't have to do more annoying and time-consuming work. It's like writing a haiku. If you can't change the world, change yourself. Ommm.
I am not sure that "(everyone - 1)" is fair. It is certainly not accurate.
It is in the case of [initbang]. Everybody except Miller agrees that it would be a welcome addition to Vanilla. At least everything I've read on this list has been positive about [initbang], and confirmed the need for it to solve at least one specific issue which is creating variable inlets in an abstraction (as well as having other benefits). But it's not there, and it won't be there, so that's one issue that cannot be overcome by avoiding externals. (Or rather, avoiding a Pd-extended internal.)
-Jonathan
Of course you are quite welcome to do whatever you like and patch however you like, and even pretend that there are no good reasons for others to avoid externals.
I will continue to optimise for my own laziness. :)
Cheers,
Chris.