[javascript-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: jit.displays - supported in JS ?

Am 19.06.2007 um 14:22 schrieb Mattijs Kneppers:

> I do understand your point and I'll quit ranting about this topic  
> until the moment we have exchanged enough cold beverages to get to  
> know each other a bit better. Promised.

Offer accepted.

> I am -not- whining about new features. I am whining about a purely  
> theoretical attitude towards future developments. But with a few  
> practical consequences. I am happy that you agree -in theory- about  
> my opinion that through-and-through consistensy would be ideal.

Of course I'm in agreement! Who wouldn't be. In what way is it a  
_bad_ idea to have a consistent development environment? I'm  
contrary, but not completely daft. ;)

> But this has a practical side effect. When vade requests such  
> consistency, I wouldn't expect the reply to be 'if you get it  
> working, no matter how, you'll be fine', but 'we'll write it down  
> and consider it, in theory, sometime, ever'. The latter is so much  
> more satisfactory to someone that takes max very seriously.

Well, I'm a practically minded person, and I'm not a programmer by  
training. I learned how to program through MaxMSP. And my very first  
priority in any case you could describe to me is: can you get it  
working at all? If you can, I'm liable to believe that that's great!  
Not just good enough, but splendid, because you've solved your problem.

I appreciate elegant, clever, concise design as much or more as the  
next guy. But I appreciate a solved problem 10x more than a soluble  
problem which remains unsolved because of the theoretical rigidity of  
the solver.

> I take Max dead serious, as I know vade does. The fact alone that I  
> work with max at least 6 days a week for more than 8 hours a day,  
> illustrates that I .. appreciate what max is now. Note,  
> 'appreciation' is an understatement. Please don't interpret my  
> comments as negative critisism, Max is absolutely great.

I don't understand any of your comments as negative. Nor as  
frustrating or irritating. Simply as idealistic. Idealism is great,  
but it's not ideal when trying to solve problems. And don't worry -  
we respect your seriousness - we're pretty serious about it too. I  
guess I just want to point out that serious people can disagree about  
a serious topic. Or agree, but come to different conclusions.

> 'if it works, it works'.. this is terribly untrue. I see so much  
> people end up hopelessly confused with max because their patch just  
> stopped working. It became just those two subpatchers too  
> complicated for them. But if they would have dropped the 'if it  
> works, it works' mentality and thought a little more about  
> structuring their patches their project would have ended up as a  
> beautiful piece of media art. Note, these are the people that  
> decide that max is too complicated for them. You will never see a  
> forum post or a support mail from someone like that.

We're working on a number of things right now which should serve to  
help bridge some of the inconsistency problems in Max, especially for  
new and intermediate users of the system. There's a lot happening  
under the hood as well, which will make future development of the  
program much, much more "tight", as well. What we do about some of  
the backward compatibility issues is still up in the air, and not  
likely to be solved immediately.

> Which doesn't mean one doesn't have to be practical and accept that  
> the cycling development team is small, that you have to deal with  
> backward compatibility, that max is only near perfect, that ibm  
> develops applications with much more inconsistencies that you'd pay  
> 100 grand for.

Word.

lg
jb