On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 04:46:50PM +0000, alex wrote:
> 2009/10/18 alex <alex_at_slab.org>:
> > From what you say I guess in most languages you give things names to
> > help you remember what they're for, and in pd and max you give them
> > shapes. The interpreter doesn't care what names or shapes you give
> > them, but they're near essential for human understanding. Actually
> > from this perspective the visual/textual distinction is clear, it's
> > not in the computation but in the presentation of it.
>
> I looked into this a bit more, others have noticed the analog between
> arrangement in visual languages and variable names, indentation etc in
> textual ones. It's called "secondary notation".
Not sure if this is relevant, but the other day I remembered something quite
important about "visual patching languages" versus normal programming
languages, and that is that generally they don't play very well with tools like
diff. For example when using a VCS it's very hard to merge the changes between
two branches of a particular visual-patch. Maybe this is just down to badly
thought out file formats though. It definately makes it difficult to work
collaboratively on Pd patches.
> The section of secondary notation in this paper is quite interesting:
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/greenery/workStuff/Papers/UsabilityVPs.PDF
>
> for example:
>
> "One of our informants reported “I quite often spend an hour or two just
> moving boxes and wires around, with no change in functionality, to make it
> that much more comprehensible when I come back to it.” It is hard to imagine
> a Pascal programmer having to spend an hour or two doing nothing but
> re-arranging the components of the program to make it comprehensible.
> Text-based programmers are aware of the need for white space and indenting,
> but usually they solve it as they go along. (On the other hand, text-based
> programmers might spend that much time going back over a program and
> inserting com- ments. Maybe this is a case of swings and roundabouts.)"
Wow, an hour or two moving boxes around? Sounds inefficient. Generally I think
it's a good idea to patch cleanly in the first place so you don't have to do
that. Also, this max video is interesting:
<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcqF9hDNoJk>
I wish Pd supported some of those UI features.
Chris.
-------------------
http://mccormick.cx
Received on Fri Oct 30 2009 - 12:30:02 GMT