On Sat, 2006-07-22 at 11:00 +0100, Nick Collins wrote:
> Don't know if anyone posted this link yet, but more controversy stirred up
> by the wired article?
>
> http://www.planet-mu.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=263491&t=263491
>
> the more irate people get, the more we should push this...
I hadn't seen that, it's a good one. It's strange though how the
overall tone is negative but when you read the posts you realise that
probably more than half of the people are at least interested in the
idea, and many positively enthusiastic. Only one person is wilfully
ignorant (yes Perl is interpreted, that's how you can livecode with
it!).
So it makes a couple of people go crazy and they are the most vocal
ones. But yes they're doing the promotional work for us, and so we
should definitely push them as you say.
Someone there makes the fair point that good livecoding output isn't
readily available. The demo I did at cybersonica that Robert videoed
and linked to from the wired article was terrible for example, although
I was clear to explain beforehand that it was a demo, not a performance,
that I usually perform with others etc. We should probably try harder
to document performances so we have the evidence when we do a good one.
The performance Ade, Dave and I did at sonar last year was a corker (to
my memory), it's a shame we don't have the video... Maybe we should use
screencast software.
Also I agree with Kassen, we should point out how accessible this stuff
is, not by dumbing down but by encouraging people to learn stuff like
Chuck and SC. I occasionally get people asking me how to set up
livecoding with Perl and it's just too difficult... But we should have
a "how do I start?" page on the TOPLAP wiki.
Of course making immediately accessible things like the totally amazing
looking betablocker makes an open doorway that people like "cunt" in the
phorum would find hard to argue against. Robert was really reporting
his understanding of live coding, and I think he tried pretty hard to
understand it. The sub-ed probably obfuscated his article a fair bit
and he didn't give us the opportunity to check over his words (which I
guess is standard journalistic process), but the outcome isn't all that
bad I don't think.
By the way I'm going to present my experiments with livecoding with
Haskell at this event in London UK on Tuesday:
http://www.asklater.com/steve/blog/?p=56
Cheers,
alex
Received on Sat Jul 22 2006 - 11:07:29 BST