← Back to context

Comment by Blackthorn

2 days ago

In order, the most popular ones of these are probably

* Max. It's built into a popular DAW, and is shockingly capable as an actual programming language too. The entire editor for the Haken line of products is written in Max.

* Pure Data or Supercollider.

* Csound.

Not ordering things like Scala or LilyPond that are much more domain-specific.

When I was first introduced to Max it was on a Mac SE in 1989, and I really only used it for saving & restoring patches (on my SY77 and U110) until someone walked me through how it really worked. I didn't understand what it could do, and I rejected it at first because it was too open-ended for me to see utility. Lol. How things changed after that.

What really blows my mind is that I wasn't at all put off by the tiny little Mac monitor, it just seemed normal. No way I could work with such a small b&w screen today I'd go mad. (weirdly I feel less creative than i did in the 1980's and NOW i have near infinite recording & mixing options. The irony.)

I learned programming with csound in the 90s but for me, Pyo and Librosa means there is no reason for a specialized language outside of python.

There is value in what has already been built for these languages but once you move beyond that, life is so much easier to just use python.

Cecilia5 is a great example of that being rewritten from csound to pyo.

Csound is funny because it's everywhere in the lineage, but relatively few people seem to arrive at it organically now