Liveblogging the SC symposium: the Future of supercollider panel discussion

James McCartney

James McCartney has some ideas about the future - compose music by composing functions (aka functional programming)  Lazy lists of infinitely long lists.

stack based, postfix language like forth (based on Joy). function composition is concatenation.  Pipelining is a natural idiom for music.  control flow is left ot right (easier than LISP). No delimiters.

There are a very few data types - reals, strings, lists, forms (protype objects that are immutable), functions, refs (which are mutable)

everything else is immutable. bind a veraible once, it stays forever. this is concurrency friendly. you can share without worrying about state.

double precision 96kHz, single sample rate

this language does not have looping because you can iterate over nested structures

this language is not all that easy to read.... (everything goes backwards)

well, it will be great for tweeting...

Tim Blechman

He's working on a new IDE. 

This looks alarmingly like emacs.

The language runs as a subprocess, so it can crash without killing the editor.

the post window moves around in an interesting way. The editor is very basic for now.

The language is not currently integrated, but i guess this is coming.

Projects might be supported. A project would contain many Sc files and have properties. Classes could be specifically for certain projects. This would be very nifty.

The Overtone Guy

He likes having the language and the server seperate (obviously, because his project relies on it). All sc-based languages need to have stuff about the UGens in it (ie metadata).  He's going to propose metadata for Sc in general for ugens, which could be an ok idea.

He also wants an OSC validation program between himself and the server. This is a terrible idea for sclang. Who is going to write this thing?

He thinks diversity should be encouraged but also sharing so as to avoid work duplication.

Discussion

Client / server division is kind of cool, says Dan. 
James says the thing he just demoed is much smaller than SC.
Tim wants to know if it would get bigger if people started using it.

Can we do sample calculations in sc? sure with James's sc4.

...language design theory....

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