On 2/15/2011 3:20 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> As I say, it looks too low-level for me.
>>
>> It is low-level. But, really, its not supposed to be a high-level tool.
>
> Same reason I dislike C. ;-)
>

And why I so very much love C and C++. I like the whole down to the 
metal thing. Granted C# is a nice departure, and can actually be rather 
pleasant to work with at times, and it will, if you ask it to allow you 
plenty of opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot quite well. You just 
have to say "Now, I'd like the opportunity to shoot myself in the foot, 
can you look the other way for a moment" ...
then after attempting to shoot yourself in the foot:

"Ok, all done here. You can turn around now. There's good news, and bad 
news: The good news is I missed. The bad news is left a big gaping hole 
in the floor; I hope you don't fall in."

To which the CLR will reply "Oh, crap. Not again."

>> But-- If you're working on a softsynth, or fooling around with DSP
>> techniques, it beats coding up a program, since it already has the
>> framework laid down, all you need to do is make the connections. It can
>> also do things live, which can be interesting.
>
> Same goes for Reaktor. Except that that has a pretty GUI and comes with
> a truckload of soft synths that are useful out-of-the-box. (OTOH, it's a
> very expensive product...)
>

Does it have a demo? I'd like to play with it. But yeah, PD's UI is 
quite ...primitive (That should get understatement of the year)

What I don't like, is there's no good way to visualize how multiple 
inputs are being sent to a control port. They're sent in the order of 
creation. Which is nice, the user has total control on how messages are 
ordered when passed, but is also a bitch when looking at it after you've 
created something and wondering why it doesn't seem to be working the 
way you need it to.

>
> Doesn't Maxima (and every other CAS that isn't Mathematica) use GNUplot
> for all its graphing?
>

Yes, Maxima does. Hence why I've learned it sucks. Especially on the 
Windows platform. That's OK. I have a graphing calculator program that 
works quite well for drawing pretty graphs.

> Anyway, Wolfram Alpha lets you solve most things for free. If you can
> convince it to comprehend the question, and if Wolfram haven't
> deliberately disabled it. For that is the biggest problem with WA;
> Wolfram talks the big talk about "making everything computable", but if

> the full version of Mathematica, would there? Thus, they have
> deliberately disabled certain queries.

So does Maxima, and it lives on the computer as a desktop application, 
and doesn't need to do a web query and can generally pop results back 
quicker. Which allows a bit of fiddling with the inputs. You can also 
save the worksheet for later.

> If only I had the time and the expertise to build something similar
> myself... (Ha! Like anybody has that much time and energy.)

Heh.... Yeah, I'm not exactly keen on writing a CAS in my spare time 
either.

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message