On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 4:01 PM Stéphane Rollandin lecteur@zogotounga.net wrote:
I think it's worth fixing the stuff in the image so it is not broken and bitrotten. Like for example the MidiInputMorph.
Oh yes, it is definitely worth it - and getting back the MIDIFileWriter too.
I have looked at your music projects, game projects and L-System also :-) It is very impressive. muO is intimidating. It is so extensive and complex I don't know where to start.
I tried to make things easy to start with in the tutorials section of the help browser. I should of course make many more of them.
Now it's no wonder that many things in muO may seem unintuitive to a non-musician. Musical representations is in itself very specific as a technical domain, and there are several original takes on different issues in muO, and lots of different entry points.
I tried to outline them in the help pages, again.
I really like your L-System with the ability to zoom in on the canvas.
Yes, this is something I did not emphasize when introducing my work here on the list, because it is an orthogonal (sub)project: all graphical editors, both in muO and in my game engine, are instances of the same kind of morph, the zoomable field. This makes them very capable in handling both tiny details and large structures, with a simple gesture for interactive zooming and in-place "floating" submorphs.
I should at some point modularize muO to make the zoomablefields available by themselves.
Actually, that's also a reason why I would like people to somewhat investigate muO (and Roguerrants): there are several classes of tools there that are interesting by themselves and could be used in different contexts, for example notebooks, zoomable fields, reactive tables, menu destructuring, modular agencies, lambda message sends.
+1
I would be much more motivated to undertake the tedious work of making some or all of them separately available, if there was a manifest interest for that - but at the moment most people are not even aware of their existence.
Getting other people interested is really hard. I don't know how to do that. In my small project I tend to focus on what I am interested in and want to do. Since I'm doing programming as a hobby, I don't cater to other people unless I absolutely have to. Big decisions are left to experts and people with deep interest in the issue. The rest of us will do the bike shedding.
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I agree with you here, muO is almost unbelievable. In a good way :-)
Thanks! In fact it is equivalent in scope to other serious frameworks for computer-assisted musical composition, and in my (no so humble, in that case) opinion, even superior to some of them.
In a sense, muO is the work I would have done if I had followed an (ideal) academic career (I studied physics for research, but did not pursue) - it is a long-term research endeavor.
Now that, after twenty years or so, I got most of the results I was trying to achieve, and that I am somewhat moving towards another domain with Roguerrants, I would very much like to share what I did.
To me it would also be a way to illustrate the amazing power for experimentation and liveness we get from Smalltalk and Morphic, and show the world what a marvelous tool we have with Squeak.
I think several tools can be extracted from your work. But it will be a little daunting for someone not familiar with the code. The codebase is so big.
I can only speak from my own experience. I find inheritance and polymorphism to be really great ways to model and extend code. It's literally standing on the shoulders of giants. But it is a double edged sword. If I don't understand the base model, it is also hard to understand the extension to that model and so forth. It makes it quite challenging to get a grasp of what is going on. When I try to read polymorphic code it's like everything is defined somewhere else. Good tools can help with that, but it takes me a long time to get familiar with a codebase.
This is not a critique of your code, more a general reflection :-)
Best, Karl
Best,
Stef
