It's great to use Pd for what it totally rocks at: making interesting graphics and music, but I wouldn't encourage it to be used as a general purpose programming language, because it simply isn't good enough at that job.

I never talked about using PD as a "general purpose" programming language. I talked about using it for what it totally rocks at, i.e. making interesting graphics and music, but doing it not only at a "prototyping level", that is not only making experiments and "small" patches, very difficult to extend, scale and mantain.

Most of the missing features you mention would indeed be very interesting and desirable and make PD very powerful even just for "making interesting graphics music" and nothing else; however, I'm quite fine with the absence of them. What is frustrating is when, after learning the way PD works and developing your own strategies for building complex and scalable things with it, you find out that things stop working when you reach a "critical mass" (not justified in terms of real processing or memory "mass") because of bugs or implementation issues.

Encapsulation; bottom-up or top-down design; modularization; reusability and parametrization. These are some of the criteria I apply when designing my patches, and I definitely don't think that is a philosophy inappropriate for a PD-like environment; I mean, I don't think I am trying to apply programming-language-coding concepts to a context where they are inappropriate.

I think PD is conceived in a way that encourages those practices, and even rewards them with exciting results at the beginning (which further incourages one), but then suddenly betrays expectations on the long run.

Miller doesn't seem to be interested in turning Pd into a general purpose programming language, which is probably a good idea since it's so good at what it does already, and doing that might ruin it completely.

I agree with that. However, it's good at what it does already as long as you don't try to do the same things at a "bigger scale".

Long live Pd, the greatest and most fun audio visual mangling tool I know of!

Yeah, of course! That's what I hope. If I didn't, I wouldn't have written all this.

-- Matteo Sisti Sette matteosistisette@gmail.com http://www.matteosistisette.com