Yes!
I've been dreaming about this api for a year. I even tried to start
implementing it using the
Ruby(druby,irb,rjb) | JSyn (Client-Server)
but I got tired. It was too complicated to start... wanned to do
something simpler. With ruby.
But now I'm in love with Io(
http://www.iolanguage.com/about/samplecode/).
I don't know, but I have the impression that programing music is going
to help the world in some sense. Everyday we are getting more and more
close to the computer. Making him look like us and us like him.
And if we help people to understand the computer.. the path to
unification will be shortened. heheeh sorry.
I'm kidding. But not much.
Ok. And why I think that programing music will help? It's like a
bridge. Everybody understands music somehow.
A few months ago I was drunk on a bar talking to a drunk friend and
his girlfriend. They don't have any technical or mathematical
instruction and I was surprised how they were unlighted when I showed
this program (to explain to them with the "what the hell you work
with" question):
7.times do
mi
end
mi mi mi mi mi 7 times
And then I advanced to
8.times do |delta|
do + delta
end
do re mi fa sol la si!!
I invented this DSL just to give them an idea... And I decided that
music was the way... As usual.. specially on bars. And it worked!
This is one of the things that fascinates me the most about
livecoding. People, looking at your screen, can grasp something very
complex, and usually so immaterial and far from most of people lifes.
Its a bit like a painting that you don't know why the painter did this
or that brush stroke but if you only care about asking yourself this
simple question you can get a broad range of emotions and 'food for
thought'.
I think that an livecode API can in the future be a very interesting
thing for the web.
You, as a developer, could, depending on the profile of the people
clicking around your web change the music everybody on the website.
Socially. DJing the web!
Or, you are there on second life or some other virtual world, flying
while dancing, surrounded by giant carrots and listening to a song
that you can easily contribute, programing... Or.. just taking a peek
at the code or something. That would be wonderful.
sorry if I get carried away. These things are a bit too geeky. :-)
but I really like what I read on this list... it gets me thinking all the time.
Aw. By the way alex, I really liked your article on livecoding and
free software. It reminded me a lot of the time I read Hacking Perl in
Nightclubs. And I agree with you that free software has everything to
do with livecoding despite the computers were build for evil,
commercial, closed reasons.
m
On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 1:13 PM, alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
>
> Yes it would be great to have a nice API for live coding!
>
> I think security concerns would affect language choice... You could
> either make a new simple language that can't do too much, or use
> something like java with a complex security framework, or a pure
> functional language like haskell. Java security is quite easy to
> configure if you can bear the sun style of technical writing. In
> Haskell I guess you would have to make a monad and disable
> unsafePerformIO somehow -- there is an irc bot that lets you run haskell
> code safely so it can be done.
>
> cheers,
>
> alex
>
>
>
Received on Wed Apr 09 2008 - 19:21:36 BST