>>> 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.

No, see, that's why I like writing in *assembly*. But C pretends to be 
high-level, but isn't.

Like, in Haskell, if I want a 64-bit unsigned integer, I say "Word64". 
In C, I say... um, well it seems to vary by compiler/OS. WTF? And this 
is supposedly a language *designed* for low-level programming? Yeah, right.

Assembly gives you total control, if that's what you want. Haskell lets 
you get on with writing a complex algorithm, if that's what you want. C 
lets you do neither of these things.

>> 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)

Yes - but it's temporarily unavailable. (How typical!)

The product page is at

http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/reaktor-5/

 From there you can look at screenshots, listen to some of the demo 
tunes, and if you click "downloads" you can download the complete User 
Manual, which will tell you something about what the product can and 
can't do.

Normally the downloads page would also have a "request a demo" button, 
which sends you an email with a unique URL to a download. The program 
runs for 30 days with saving disabled, but otherwise it's fully 
functional. (If you type in a registration key, it becomes the full 
product.)

I presume you've also heard by rendition of Silhouettes? That was made 
using nothing but one single synth that comes with the default Reaktor 
install. (A synth called Steam Pipe.) It uses waveguide synthesis to 
make quite authentic wind and string sounds. In case you wanted to know 
what Reaktor sounds like in the hands of a typical person, not the NI 
marketing department. ;-)

> 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.

Reaktor has a few annoying limitations too.

- You can create "components", but changing one instance of a component 
doesn't affect any of the other instances.

- There are no looping constructs.

The first one doesn't bite too much if you implement your components 
correctly first time. If you don't, it's a PITA.

The second one means that if, say, you wanted a bank of 200 filters each 
tuned to a different frequency... you have to insert all 200 filters by 
hand, one at a time.

[There's a hack: Create a synth with 200 notes polyphonic, put one 
filter into it, and use the voiceID to set the filter's frequency. 
Needless to say, this trick only works once per synth...]

>> 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.

LOL!

> Especially on the Windows platform.

*Everything* with GNU in the name sucks on Windows!

>> Anyway, Wolfram Alpha lets you solve most things for free.
>
> 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.

Wolfram knows things like unit conversion factors, and it knows formulas 
that you'd have to look up in a textbook if you wanted Maxima to compute 
them. Plus you can use it to look up statistics that Maxima doesn't have 
access to.

On the other hand, it can only answer questions simple enough to be 
written as a single question. Maxima (or any other desktop application) 
has the killer advantage that you can build far more complex scenarios 
with it.

>> 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.

At its core, Mathematica is a transformation engine. The engine knows 
nothing about mathematics; it just takes an expression and applies any 
applicable transformation rules to it, repeatedly until no more rules 
apply. You can (and people have) use it for things that aren't math.

Implementing Mathematica's transformation engine is a relatively 
straight-forward task. Duplicating Mathematica's extensive library of 
mathematical transformations is not. (!) They've put 20+ years of R&D 
into that library. There's no way one person is going to duplicate it in 
ten minutes.

(It's a bit like saying that writing an OS kernel is easy, but building 
a complete desktop OS is not.

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