Could not agree more.
Just to add one way that these things might be related…
I once saw a lecture about C++ (by one of the adobe devs, forget which one) talking about a related term, inclusivity.
Essentially, he argued that against rust, C++ wasn’t very inclusive, and couldn’t be to the extent rust is because it has many thorny edges and cases where the user can ‘blow their foot off’.
The point being, in rust, the discourse might look like…
- person A: I’m trying to do this, what do you think
....some code
- person B: This approach has some advantages, but have you considered
...some code, it has these pros and cons … blah blah blah
Whereas in C++ its more like…
- person A: I’m trying to do this, what do you think
....some code
- person C: this is outdated and dangerous, go learn about
some newer feature
Whilst person C’s tone might have been more considered, they are fundamentally correct as these things lead to poor dangerous software and a lot of wasted time.
Supercollider, whilst not as bad as C++ does have several difficulties that can lead users down paths where their code, and therefore musical performance, can easily fail or place unnecessary limits on their music. While the C++ community needs to steer people away from writing memory leaks and what-not, the supercollider community ties to help people write code that can scale with their practice, allowing them to explore new musical possibilities, whilst building pieces/instruments that are stable enough to take on stage.
My point is that, perhaps, software design influences community discourse?
And that, whilst all community members want to help, steering people towards writing sustainable code is challenging, as ultimately, we do not want to include (unintentionally) broken or otherwise temperamental software that can lead to poor experiences with Supercollider, or worse, wasted time or failed performances.
It is interesting that @jordanwhitede mentioned Tidal, being, of course, built on Haskell — a challenging, but safe language. Rust is the other language/community that takes inclusivity seriously to the core of its design.
And whilst this has been about inclusivity of software-use and musical perspective, perhaps, by having a safer (or at least less fragile) software — and thereby, more inclusive and accepting discourse —,
we might attract a larger, and therefore, increasingly diverse user base?