Hi,
- Alexandre Torres Porres porres@gmail.com [2022-11-21 04:10]:
While we're at it, over my years in the Pd land, the feedback I got the most was how Pd Vanilla's documentation was so "poor" and "inferior" to, for instance, Pd-Extended's (not to mention MAX's). Currently Extended is reincarnated as Pd-l2ork/Purr Data, which are also praised as "better documented".
I always found Pd-Extended to be overloaded and a bit bloated. The reasons why Pd has a simple and "pure" design are stated by Miller in several of his publications. One of the reasons was to keep the code managable. If I remember correctly, the complexity of Extended was also what brought it down in the end when Hans coulnd't keep up with the workload.
I became a Pd user when, I don't know, maybe over 90% of people used Pd-Extended :)
I remember that time differently and doubt that 90% were using Extended over Vanilla. I do remember Extended being pushed as the one distribution that has all externals already included ("simply works"), a very noble attempt, that is no longer around due to the complexity involved in the development and maintenance. The comunity has learned from that experience and has established the fantastic Deken package manager!
I'm designing a tutorial that I use to teach for about 15 years and it depended on Pd Extended for over a decade. Now it depends on ELSE which has a more discrete template design. I never saw anyone being confused by the complexity, colorfulness or whatever... on the contrary!
All fine, I was only raising this topic for Vanilla, not wrt. to the valuable contributions you mention.
Pd extended is gone but I'm still not sure we've fully got over it.
Yes we are over it, because we have the Deken package manager.
When dealing with recent changes to Pd's documentation, I can say there were requests to copy the model of Pd-extended/Purr Data into Vanilla or use it as a basis. Funny how people have different desires and expectations, right?
Yes, I don't see a need to copy that model into Vanilla help patches and like Miller's style therein very much.
[...]
The point I am making is that there are thoughts on my side on what people mostly want, despite possible divergences. When proposing such things, I'm taking it all into consideration. The general feedback from the facebook group (with no negative feedback so far) seems to point to the fact that the acceptance is mostly good, as I expected.
As already stated, don't take a FB group as representative. Maybe don't take this mailing list as representative either, but at least it is open (sourced) and has an archive that will be accessible forever and doesn't entrust our communication to a questionable company with a dangerous monopoly.
Anyway, I would love to see more opinions from others.
cheersz, P