On Jun 16, 2006, at 3:03 AM, Torsten Anders wrote:
On 16.06.2006, at 07:19, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I personally have been recently driven to make Pd a full-fledged programming language
How do you define 'a full-fledged programming language'? What do you miss in PD? And why do you feel uncomfortable with existing programming languages you may describe as 'full-fledged' so you need to beef up PD?
I miss visual programming when using other languages. A decent programming environment should be able to do whatever its users' want it to do. Why are the python people reimplementing all these APIs in python when they already exist in Perl? Why did the perl hackers reimplement all these APIs when they already exist in C? Its the same question.
I am in general very sceptical whether visual programming languages scale up for complex tasks (e.g. which visual programming language is defined largely in itself -- as e.g. Lisp or SmallTalk usually are) but I would be very interested if someone can show me otherwise.
Pd has some fundamental design issues that will prevent it from becoming a general purpose language. String handling is a major issue, for example, and the symbol/list weirdness. You might be interested in looking at netpd. They implemented version control, textfile parsing, and network distribution and management of files all in Pd. Seeing that really made me think that Pd could be a general purpose programming language.
.hc
Best, Torsten
-- Torsten Anders Sonic Arts Research Centre • Queen's University Belfast Frankstr. 49 • D-50996 Köln Tel: +49-221-3980750 www.torsten-anders.de strasheela.sourceforge.net
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