2009/8/22 Kassen
Well, as a long-time Schemer (and very occasional ChucK recreator), I find ChucK to be a very unfriendly programming environment.
Really? Well, it's supposed to be friendly and welcoming so something is wrong there.
Hang on. I imagine that it's very friendly to someone who is not a working programmer :) And I will also stipulate that some of my problem may be with the documentation, but seriously how can a language where I can't allocate an array who size is only known at run-time be called friendly? Having said that, I do rather like ChucK. It just feels about half-finished.
My tips would be; *Download and read Ge's doctoral thesis. More so than the manual it explains the underlying concepts and reasoning, the "why of ChucK", if you wish. IMHO this is a undervalued document for understanding ChucK; http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/thesis.html
Will do. And thanks for the tip.
*List what you feel is wrong on the list for debate and potential fixes or perhaps explanations on why these things might make sense after all; I don't know and I can't help if you don't explain what issues you have.
Well the second most obvious one is having to list all the files needed on the command line :) Strict file scope for variables, but not for classes is another annoyance. No object constructors feels dangerous, especially in light of a deeply inherited class hierarchy. All of which are not really show-stoppers. But the array thing has me generating code in Scheme to run under ChucK.
*Have a look at Supercollider, some people who feel ChucK is unfriendly feel
Interesting. And thanks for the tip.
Of course it should also be said that ChucK uses some odd/new ideas that may only properly sink in after having used them for a while; I'm not sure how much ChucK you already wrote.
I actually find most of ChucK's innovations (the timing constructs and shreds) to be fairly nice. It's the stuff around the edges which makes me nuts.
license comes with it. Click here; http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/release/
Brill!
dislike ChucK and come from a Scheme background C++ may not be your idea of fun. I'm not sure anybody thinks C++ is great fun.
I don;t. But I've been getting paid for it for 20+ years (ick! ick! ick!). I feel competent to deal with nearly anything in C++. I'm not planning to chuck out the baby just yet :) david -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt