[linux-audio-user] RE: Should I Bother Learning Csound?

[Paul Winkler]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 11:26:34AM -0600, Peter Groves wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 6 Feb 2004 linux-audio-user-request at music.columbia.edu wrote:
> | From: Dave Phillips <dlphilp at bright.net>
> | Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] Should I Bother Learning Csound?
> 
> |   Considering the low cost of each of these systems, why not try them
> | all ? You might also want to consider Common Lisp Music, a Lisp-based
> | system. Btw, both CLM and SC3 are very much object-oriented languages,
> | while Csound and RTcmix are modeled after more procedural languages.
> 
> Well, that would be ideal, but I'm trying to get the most power for the
> smallest amount of time spent learning it. Given all the comments, I
> think I will give Csound a shot. I use java at work, so I'm used to
> using a crappy language just because it has good libraries

ok. but realize going in that csound is really severely crippled as a 
high-level programming language. You can't make functions, subroutines, or 
anything of that ilk. There are no for or while loops. The *only* 
kind of conditional branching requires a "goto" target.
There are macros, but they are horrible. In other words,
you can't really do structured programming at all.
You end up doing tons of copy/paste and spaghetti.

Except for all that, csound is great ;-)

> When writing
> similar code over and over, I have resorted to writing my own
> template/preprocessor before. If I really end up liking what csound can
> do, but hate the language constructs, I might go down that road. I think
> I might have seen something like that done already Python, but I can't
> recall where right now.

pythonsound.sf.net.
Be aware that its author abandoned it in favor of CLM,
and I'm the only other developer and I haven't touched it in at
least a year.

Maurizio, the pythonsound/omde/pymask creator, told me (paraphrasing) 
"I spent months of my spare time trying to invent a python library that 
would enable me to compose.  I learned enough Lisp to compose
in two days."

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's SNAIL-DOG CREAM!
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)