I agree with many of @Dindoleon’s points.
I also have some teaching (and of course learning) experience with students of various majors using the following software programs:
- SuperCollider, Max (pd, csound, editing etc)
- Audacity, Cockos Reaper, Audition, Ableton Live, Magix Samplitude Silver, (Logic Pro, Nuendo, ProTools)
- Paul’s Extreme Stretch
- MakeMusic Finale, Avid Sibelius
- etc.
Students of computer science related subjects or those with programming experience learn SuperCollider with less of a learning curve, although some of them, who learn SuperCollider very quickly and write well written code, do not really understand the acoustic and compositional, musical basics behind the code. I think this shows that SuperCollider is somewhat biased towards the technical aspect, especially programming skills.
Musicians, including composers, generally find SuperCollider more difficult to learn than Max or PD. Musicians are usually used to using GUI based programs. I have not taught Max or PD to non-musicians, but students of other subjects usually find it difficult to use SuperCollider as well.
Where do these difficulties come from?
This difficulty starts with the installation of the plug-in and Quark, not to mention the server-client structure, which has recently been blocked by the OS due to security issues.
I would have to spend too much time checking that all the students had them installed correctly.
In contrast, GUI-based software such as Audacity and Reaper are easy to teach.
In short, using SuperCollider requires computer science skills, programming knowledge and a programmer’s mind, and reducing the core libraries and increasing the number of Quarks will increase this difficulty for the following reasons:
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Backwards compatibility. No need to explain again!
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There are too many Quarks, many of them are not well maintained and there is a lack of help documents. It is perfectly fine for the Quarks that are not listed in the official Quark directory file (https://github.com/supercollider-quarks/quarks/blob/master/directory.txt) not to provide a help document following the given help document guide. However, many Quarks in the directory files do not seem to be well maintained and do not provide the help documents, although they should. I think these Quarks are considered published, not private use for the publishers, and maintenance and help documents are important.
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Installing a Quark may cause compilation errors or overwrite the class method. There are too many such cases. Why does this happen? The reason is that Quarks are not maintained by central developers, but by individual needs. Reducing the size of the core library increases the number of such cases, and it becomes a vicious circle.
To overcome these three things, the skills and knowledge required are not musical or music theory things, but computer science and programming skills.
If SuperCollider is not only for the prominent users, who are not only musicians, artists and researchers, but also developers, but also for normal users (including musicians), the following is required
- An easy to use installation method:
- sc3 plugins should be in the core library
- Useful quark should also be in the core library
- Well-described help documents
Although there are no competitors to SuperCollider for algorithmic composition, it is very strange that
- SuperCollider has no way of creating scores like nslider or the Bach library in Max.
- It does not have its own way of creating musicXML to export the score.
- It has no way of using pitch names, pitch class sets and pitch intervals. So getting the MIDI pitch number and frequency from the pitch name is not supported by the core class library.
So we should not only discuss how to reduce the sclang core classes, but also what features SuperCollider should have to make it more useful and practical for musicians, artists and researchers.
Many years ago, I asked about the nslider and kslider equivalents of pd in the pd user groups in Telegram. Someone wrote that I should (or could) implement them myself if I needed to. Oh… no… I hope that this kind of perspective is not in the SuperCollider developers.
I hope that SuperCollider will become a more beloved tool not only for computer science majors, but also for other majors, including musicians. (I feel that SC users are getting smaller than before. I hope this is just my misperception).