Anyone who would get scared off by the gymnastics/spaghetti of that patch would
already have been scared off by the lack of clean symbol manipulation tools in
Pd vanilla.
Your original design failed because you ignored the ease with which people can
ignore the innards of a much needed abstraction. Abstractions are powerful
because they don't require the author to know another language, and they can
immediately be distributed to any platform on which Pd runs. Anyone who saw
your list-drip-quick attachment on the list could make use of it right away in
a patch.
-Jonathan
From: Mathieu Bouchard ma...@artengine.ca
To: Jonathan Wilkes jancs...@yahoo.com
Cc: Miller Puckette m...@ucsd.edu; Alexandre Torres Porres
por...@gmail.com; pd-lista puredata pd-list@iem.at
Sent: Sunday, August 7, 2011 2:18 PM
Subject: Turing Tarpit (was Re: (breaking symbols))
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
I don't understand what you're saying about receive symbols. How do you get
the single characters in the first place?
Oh, nevermind. Just a silly mistake of mine.
Anyway... I think that all this kind of thing will do, is scare off any
potential pd users that like clean designs... I mean, such patches are quite
skilled,
but wouldn't it be nice if such skills could concentrate more on things that
aren't Turing Tarpit Voodoo Dance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
It does scare me that my [list-drip] is more used than my [foreach]. Both do
the same thing, but [list-drip] is more twisted, much slower than [foreach],
and I originally designed it to show how ridiculous things can get when trying
to be efficient while sticking to what plain vanilla 42 has to offer. The
answer is that what is considered the standard class library (used by
everybody) has to grow faster than what someone is willing to do. Few people
have the luxury of holding back additions to core software while pondering a
few years on how to name them.
I consider my [list-drip] to be a small improvement over the older
[list-drip]. The big improvement is when people will stop insisting on using an
abstraction for doing something that ought to be written in C.
___
| Mathieu Bouchard tél: +1.514.383.3801 Villeray, Montréal, QC
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