On 8/22/07, chris beck <render787@gmail.com> wrote:

I would disagree with that reasoning. Sure it's produced by academics, but this is the USERS list. And it is fundamentally a practical tool, not an academic exercise as you suggest. The fact that we are discussing it on this list means that usability is a serious concern.

Although I might not disagree with the conclusion, the language itself certainly can and should be improved. I would say that standardizing the Ugen / Instrument interfaces should be high on this list.

This is getting interesting. As I see it ChucK is quite interesting as a language that comes from accedemic research in that the main area of research is a way of using it and not so much the language itself, at least that's how I read some of the accedemic papers linked to ChucK. The fact that there is a actives users list is a noteworthy outcome of the research already.

Normally a very important feature for a language is "Turing completeness" meaning that that language should be able to calculate anything that can be calculated (given enough time and memory/disc). Perhaps we need a new sort of completeness to test ChucK against since what we are after is realy the ability to musically express anything we might like to musically express.

From that perspective I think language features like lists can be every bit as important as Ugen standardisation/improvement/additions which in turn can be as important as conveniences like include-statements or recompiling only a section of a program.

The main matter might realy be *preceived* "musical-completeness" by it's users. Guitarists clearly hold that being unable to play chords larger then 6 notes is no real issue while pianists tend not to be concerned with pitch-bend. Perhaps what we should be after is reaching a similar stage where the limitations and posibilities of ChucK form a instrument that gets preceived as being expressive and coherent in a way similar to other instruments.