Alex McLean

He did command line scripts 2001-2004, then started working in perl, the Haskell.

slub - writing code to make music to drink beer to.

Feedback.pl - writing code to write code to make music to drink beer to

He read Laurie Spiegel's paper on manipulations of musical patterns, so he got into pattern languages (ie HMSL, Common music, SuperCollider)

Tidal is embedded in Haskell for pattern manipulation for music. Complexity through combination of simplicity.

Structures could be trees of structures...

So he moved to functions of time. Time is an integer. Give a Pattern a time and it gives you an integer and the periodicity. This is limited because time is an integer.

Now, he thinks of time as cyclic, with repetition. So make time a floating point instead of an int. But this makes lookups hard.

So the thought of having patterns be a sequence with discrete stuff or a signal, which is indexed by a rational and is non-discrete. However, mixing analog and digital in one data type is a problem.

So he made separate types, but then this caused massive code inflation.

He's gone back to one type again.

Haskell is intense.....

and REALLY concise

Questions

Does the system have state? No, which means he can't even have random numbers.

Is time still a loop in the current version? Notionally, yes. But representationally, it's a number, just in the functions, so its what you make it.