I think the original post was not about "good style" but about methods/techniques for "structured" patching, that is (as I interprete it and I may be wrong), how to "write" mantainable, reusable, scalable (etc.) "code" in PD.
I do understand that the two things are related, as "good style" improves readability, and readability is essential for mantainability, reusability and scalability (etc.).
Let me do a parallelism with "coding" programming languages. Suppose we were talking about a book on object-oriented programming techniques.
The subjects discussed in the book would not be such things as when to use upper or lower case in method/class names, nor indentation, nor whether/when it is more elegant to use for vs. while, or switch vs. if... else if... The subjects discussed would be things like: using private variables and get/set methods vs. using public variables; defining and implementing interfaces vs. extending classes; singletons vs. static classes.... etc. Things that are less subject to personal tastes and can be analysed at a more "objective" level - although OF COURSE everything is always questionable.
Also, one thing that had been mentioned as an aim was avoiding spaghetti, and this is reasonably objective, although the amount of spaghetti cannot be scientifically measured of course :)
Just my 0.2 cents m.
IOHannes wrote:
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
This all makes me think that we should write a Pd book that covers things like good form. Perhaps we could make it a decentralized collaborative effort with strange consensus decisionmaking to mirror the Pd community :D
i guess that Pd might be out of existence when the book will be ready...
seriously, i do think that there are fundamentally (and not so fundamentally) different views on "good form" (as all the flaming on [t a] vs. [trigger anything] shows), and i don't think that we would come to a conclusion.
so i see 2 approaches to such project:
- a collection of several individiual "good style" articles; possibly
contradictory (e.g. in the way of the "beautiful code" book that primarily shows how differently "beauty" is perceived)
- a single (group of) person(s) that write(s) the book and can decide on
their definition of "good style"; since they do all the work, they have all the right to ignore (or whatever) other opinions
i personally would favour #1, but i think both approaches are legitimate