2009/10/18 Chris McCormick <chris_at_mccormick.cx>:
> What I am trying to work out is whether Pd's graph based layout gives us
> something that isn't textual, and if so, why. All I have at the moment are
> "programming feelings" that it's different, but I would like to establish
> exactly how it's different.
[fast forward]
> At most I could say that you get some kind of an architectural
> impression/overview more quickly than reading all of the code of a purely
> textual language. Sometimes you can recognise certain patching idioms by the
> arrangement of boxes on the screen but that relies on a) knowing the author's
> patching style already and b) that style being 'clean' and c) reading what's in
> some of the boxes anyway.
>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.
It's a real shame that interpreters generally don't infer meaning from
the morphology of words or shapes. As humans love morphology so much,
can't we make our computers use it too? IIRC, in ruby you add an
exclamation mark on the end of some functions to make in-place
changes. Why doesn't this kind of morphological nicety run through
programming language design? When will get a turing complete
reactable (or is it already?)?
> Yep, agree completely. I think you are in a unique position to see how you can
> do graph-language like things with a completely text based language. Infact,
> what you are doing with Haskell may be in some instances functionally exactly
> the same as what people do in Pd. It's just the tool that's used to do it which
> is different.
Well I'm not doing any DSP, and haven't thought of it as dataflow
before. I need to read more about FRP for sure.
> Can you look at Dave's chilli-eating recursive totempoles and know from the
> visual structure what kind of thing he is coding without reading what is in the
> boxes themselves? Do certain elements of the totempole begin to look like a
> certain sound-shape?
No idea, Dave?
Here's what happens if you try to diagram a class of Haskell higher
order functions:
http://cale.yi.org/index.php/Fold_Diagrams
I'm not sure if they help understanding or not...
Got to dash, off on holiday, cheerio!
alex
Received on Sun Oct 18 2009 - 12:14:34 BST