> Hi Kassen, Nick,
Hi Sylvain!
>
> The statement I made was of course bad faith, and I was not claiming any
> superiority of SC on any other livecoding environment. It was not to be
> taken seriously, just meant to (gently) poke chuck users as I am an SC user
> myself.
Sure. It was a bit of provocative statement, maybe a challenging one but I
don't see anything bad in that. To me there is provocative aspect to
livecoding itself. As long as we stay respectful I think that's very
healthy. I'd like to address some of your points below still as I think some
things could be clarified a bit.
> And, of course, I did not launch this questionnaire to prove this point. I
> was just curious, and I indeed am quite struck of the number of different
> possibilities to livecode. I wasn't aware for example that it was possible
> to livecode in C, REALBasic ... So, I think the most relevant result lies
> after the fifth place, getting aware of what some people use to livecode.
> And it intices me to know more about what is possible in livecoding.
>
I think you succeeded quite well there. Good job. I agree, BTW, that the
ratio between people who tried SC and who are regularly using it is one of
the more remarkable results.
>
> By the way, to rebound on the results and try to explain the first places,
> and the fact that the trio Fluxus/Chuck/Impromptu got more "tries" than
> regular users is the fact that these software are *per se* livecoding
> environments (as far as I know) unlike SC which can be used also for non
> real time synthesis. I am pretty sure there is even a certain amount of
> people using SC without having livecoded or used JITLib.
Well, ChucK can render audio in non-realtime. It's quite suitable for things
that you might use SC for. You can write sequencers or synths or you could
compose in it. Fluxus can be used for things like game prototyping, I'm not
sure about Impromptu but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't used for
similar things.
>
> So to say, that this trio software have dedicated mailing lists where (I
> guess, I am not a subscriber) people already talk about livecoding, whereas
> SC list only gets a few topics on livecode.
The fluxus list is mainly filled with talk about developing Fluxus, I think
the ChucK list is quite comparable to the SC one. I think it's actually a
small minority of ChucKists that actively livecodes; I'm not sure where that
reputation came from, maybe from Ge using livecoding as a way of promoting
ChucK in the early days. As far as I can see it's more popular for things
like creating instruments using a Monome and so on than for livecoding. I
could be wrong there, sometimes it's hard to tell what people are working
on. If I would have to pick I'd actually say that ChucK is more suitable for
creating custom instruments than it is for livecoding. It's true that there
are some architectural choices that should make ChucK extremely well suited
for livecoding in the future but right now it's hard to find satisfactory
way of updating code, even if writing code quickly is relatively easy. That
could simply be just me, I'd like to know more about -for example- Graham's
approach.
> I guess then that SC users who wants to talk on livecoding would post on
> this list whereas the other trio could do so directly on their dedicated
> lists. Thus, the percentage of SC users on livecode list, compared to the
> other, might be higher and explaining the fact that SC users *also* tried
> Chuck/Fluxus/Impromptu but did not stick to them for the reasons you and
> Nick explained very well.
>
No, I think there simply are more people using SC for livecoding then there
are for CK. If anything I imagine that the relative youth of CK, Fluxus and
Impromptu makes them interesting to try out, SC is far older and more
mature.
I wouldn't be surprised if what would turn out to be most common for the
userbase of all four would be a cross between private livecoding and a
creative approach towards rapid prototyping.
> And of course, I am really happy to see such diversity in programming
> environments, which also means that livecoding is really alive. And I also
> always feel impressed when experiencing other people using different
> OS/environments/software than I do.
>
Oh, yes, as I said; I took your somewhat provocative remark that way. I
clearly said I was "biting" at your "troll". I enjoyed Nick's notes as well.
Actually I'm quite fascinated by this interaction between our emotions and
computer systems. It's fascinating to me that some people develop such a
strong emotional feeling about their Mac, that we can develop friendships,
even close friendship or romantic relationships through simply writing
emails or chatting on computers. As I'm sure list members are more aware of
than most people; it's all just ones and zeros expressing rules, there is no
"magic" and yet we still feel strongly about it. Some people go as far as
describing certain inanimate objects as "sexy". To phrase it in a different
way; to me our reactions to and experience of these systems is more
interesting than any innate properties those systems may have.
That said; the SC-CK rivalry is of course a very real thing that should be
taken very seriously. After all; it's well known that SC users eat babies
;¬).
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Sun Jan 11 2009 - 15:29:34 GMT