Wonderful discussions. A few random comments:
1) At the risk of chic hipster metadom, I would say this discussion is
itself an argument between a certain "live" perspective (definitions evolve
depending on the exigencies of practice) and a "coding" perspective
(definitions provide a useful basis on which practices can evolve). Nobody
is pedantically for either side, which just shows the wonderful real
commitment to thought-in-process that I've always seen on this list. Maybe
we should be annoying and encourage a constantly changing (live
coded!) definition on the web? :-P
2) I would tend to emphasize the way live coding differs from coding, so
not performance, or audience, or musical purpose, but just the way that
live coding celebrates but also eschews the autonomy of code/computer vs.
the artist. Plato's Phaedrus, where the difference between the record of a
written word and the presence of a speaker is emphasized, comes to mind.
3) Is coding a function of computers? Are computers special or is code
special? I would usually answer that code is a more fundamental idea, but
OTOH, Eckert created a serial computer largely to make maximum utilization
of electronic components, as a serial computer is constantly using most of
its components in any given time slice whereas a parallel machine with many
different processing units generally leaves most of them idle. Seriality is
so central to code that it would seem there's at least some relationship
there between electronics, economics (cost), and code.
-Evan
On Monday, December 28, 2015, Tristan Strange <tristan.strange_at_gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 27 December 2015 at 17:00, David Barbour <dmbarbour_at_gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > Excel is not what I'd consider powerful.
> You and I have very different ideas what a spectrum of computational power
> is.
>
> Excel is a turing complete (people consider it a dataflow language),
> and expressing time varying behaviour is a doddle.
>
> If I was using a fluffier definition of power and talk about its
> side-effect generating power I might to say I consider it more
> powerful than some obscure and hip coding environment that doesn't
> have mature stack underneath it... a couple of clicks and your
> querying a database and with a thin layer of VBA and you're chatting
> with the universe. You can't say that of SuperCollider, Elixir or
> brainfuck.
>
> For the most part in Excel I think you get your side-effects back with
> less effort than you do a programming language.
>
> --
>
> Read the whole topic here: livecode:
> http://lurk.org/r/topic/72T4TuAKcJHgfteGj4Hi7X
>
> To leave livecode, email livecode_at_group.lurk.org <javascript:;> with the
> following email subject: unsubscribe
>
--
Read the whole topic here: livecode:
http://lurk.org/r/topic/1e9rY83diWCh1YxORgyS1E
To leave livecode, email livecode_at_group.lurk.org with the following email subject: unsubscribe
Received on Tue Dec 29 2015 - 06:09:09 GMT