This IS a pity - though I do feel mildly prickly about this statement because both on the forum and in private messages / via back-end technical work, I’ve spend maaaaaaaaaany very boring hours trying to resolve and improve some of the issues people had with mailing-list style usage. Many of the major issues have been resolved for a while now - some still exist too. A few people never found a workflow they liked and sadly faded out of participation. However, the forum userbase is significantly larger than the mailing list ever was, and we have significantly fewer problems with email delivery than the mailing lists did, which is obviously a positive.
It’s a shame that this has to be the trade-off though. Mailing lists are still an option - it’s unfortunate that no one has stepped up to work on this, but it costs money and quite a lot of effort so it’s also not entirely surprising.
This is real - the last generational contribution to SuperCollider was probably the IDE and QT support, and that was a fully funded project. They almost for sure wouldn’t have happened without institutional support. Lucile is right, that the emotional and intellectual labor of building consensus is significant, and without this you run the eternal OS risk of merely creating a fork that no one uses or maintains. Both routes are rough going for many of us who already spent our work days writing code and trying to build consensus on difficult technical topics - spending evening and weekends doing this for an OS project like SuperCollider as well can end up ranging anywhere from “frustrating” to “mental health disaster”.
Setting up a SuperCollider foundation or fund that could fund target-of-opportunity projects would be an absolute game-changer - but this requires some very specific institutional know-how, and I don’t know if we have anyone in the community that’s up for taking on this kind of project, sadly.
Sorry, the intention was not to criticize, but to think about the situation. I recognize that the effort of setting/maintaining a list, setting/maintaining a forum or even both is really big…
I know it is pretty impossible to make everyone happy with a solution, and this is a special curse regarding FLOSS…
I also see that some people are only attached to discussing SC on the facebook community, on the other hand, some have strong ethical concerns and would not even allow themselves to create a facebook account. Would it be possible to integrate those people here? I don’t think so, but I wish…
What I feel sad about is not seeing several people that once were attached to the list and to facebook contributing to the forum, I think we are losing a broader discussion due to it…
SC4 will never materialize unless an unprecedented change happens in the project’s decision-making process. This, in combination with the enormous technical debt, to me signals that SC is headed for obsolescence.
It is partially for these reasons that I’m working on a new environment to gradually replace SC in my music. I won’t divulge too many details other than the fact that I’m not designing a new language.
This is unfortunately. Similarly, there are a lot of amazing people + lively discussion on the Discord, and almost none of those people end up here. Partially we can chalk this up to the nature of online communication platforms, I guess.
A few (apologies if wrong or out of date) @elifieldsteel is at UICU I think - @muellmusik University of Birmingham - CCRMAat Stanford. has a workshop right about now (not sure who is teaching!) @dkmayer is at IEM Graz - @madskjeldgaard is at NOTAM DXArts at UW has had a lot of SC stuff through the years FluCoMA comes out of University of Huddersfield I think?David Cottle is associated with University of Utah…
indeed this is true. but UK academia definitely doesn’t give anyone any overhead to even do the actual job we’re supposed to do (don’t get me started) so until I find one of those fat unicorn chairs somewhere else, if they still exist, then expect the odd bug report from yours truly and a bit of money to help this site to survive, obviously.
@Sam_Pluta is at Peabody and teaches it. He and @tedmoore (and a bit of @groma too) are responsible for my late conversion from other platforms I won’t name…
Very interesting recent comments here. A few thoughts:
While there are usually strong arguments for and against any given language design choice, and it is true that SC has become more of a hybrid/compromise as time has gone on, I am not sure that some particular set of ‘good design’ is really what makes a language successful. C++ is a horrible language in many people’s opinions (okay perhaps a little less horrible than it used to be, but still…) but remains immensely popular and widely used, even with numerous better designed alternatives available.
I think SC’s strengths are a mix of things, but realtime safety, powerful built-in domain-specific functionality and extensions, and a well established and overall (flame shield on) supportive community. As PA says it works for artists, and that’s the target community or at least the core of it. Many SC users couldn’t care less about hard or soft typing. But Patterns…! It also managed to provide convincing workarounds to some of the traps/pitfalls/shortcomings of the incumbents (Max family/Csound) at an opportune moment in the history of such environments. There was thus a real payoff in learning it. All that snowballed…
Of course if you were designing a new SC from scratch today, you’d do it differently. The available design models, target hardware, possible use cases etc are all different. But that alone won’t make it successful. So I think any future developments should strongly target maintaining those existing strengths, and any big disruptive changes need a big payoff for that core constituency. Otherwise I think they’re unlikely to gain traction, as we’ve seen with many very well intentioned and enthusiastic attempts over the years.
Regarding the idea of a foundation, I think it’s great in principle, but I wonder about the reach of SC. Python can do this because it has a huge user base and wealthy stakeholders.
Without that, I think longevity remains a concern. I would love for the University of Birmingham to host such a thing, and perhaps I could convince them. But what happens when I retire if they don’t replace me with someone equally invested? Institutions sound great for giving these things some permanence, but at the end of the day institutions are people, and with the best will in the world it’s very difficult to maintain such things if there isn’t on the ground individual commitment.
All of which is not to say that couldn’t work, but just to be careful around that issue. A targeted and funded research project (a la Flucoma) with clear aims and a limited timeline could work better at making some big steps forward, though it can be hard to sell the kind of maintenance, reworking, fixing work that FLOSS projects often need to funders looking for exciting projects. But properly pitched this could be very successful, and a much easier lift than a permanent foundation. I’d be very happy to work with people on an application of this sort!
Finally, as it keeps coming up, just some clarification about the mailing lists for those who may not know:
I kept them going for as long as I could, as I know many people preferred them, but in the end institutional decisions made it impractical to continue. As I said at the time, people were naturally welcome to start a new list elsewhere if they wanted, but GDPR meant we could not simply move the archive to a new host.
Someone still can start a list of course (after more than a decade moderating, I thought it would perhaps be better if it was someone else) but I think the forum is a good compromise and I hope it makes most people mostly happy. It too may have longevity and/or ownership issues at some point, but I think the SC community is established and large enough now that it can support multiple fora, and shouldn’t be too dependent on any one’s survival. I admit I’m not as active here as I was on the lists, but that would probably have happened for other reasons anyway, and I’m always encouraged by the health of the discussion I see here.
I now remember that there was this topic about crowdfunding or making a foundation for SC.
I suggest that we keep the discussion about financial resources and support there as much as possible and the topics regarding the language and technical aspects here.
Reading it again made me happy with how much SC has evolved (IDE, windows compatibility, NRT, bug fixes, midi and serial support, etc etc). But the topic about fund raising was still a problem there and no proper solution came out of it…
I use SCNvim and love it but for now the IDE is necessary for new non-coder users. I could imagine the LSP work that @scztt is working on (building on the parser that @lnihlen wrote) eventually making the IDE unnecessary but I expect that’s a while off (if ever!)
I don’t think that SCIDE is an amazing IDE, but I do think that it is great and do its job pretty well. Is it costly to maintain? I can’t say.
But based on this:
I assume that removing the IDE will block several artists from accessing SC. I’ve attended to the previous International Live Coding Conference (ICLC) and I was impressed with how big the scene is, also impressed that around 10% of the people were using sclang, scide and scsynth together as their main live coding platform (which is easy to understand).
If SCIDE could also ship tidal natively I think that the SC community would grow more faster, but I understand the amount of work necessary plus the coordination with tidal…
Moreover, adopting some general IDE as the main substitute for SCIDE, I assume it is also problematic. Several projects relied on Atom as their base IDE (including Tidal) and suddenly Atom was over… + the problem of installation: SCIDE is also great because it is super easy to install, a great entry point. + the difficulties of customizing a general IDE for having a docked help, server meter, run all the shortcuts, etc…
IMO, having a personal IDE is not waste of resources. If this was not the case, big environments like Matlab, Python, Processing, Latex, would never have done so…
Scide should not be understood as an “IDE” (those things do all sorts of things in the backgrounds, it’s scary sometimes), but as an efficient lightweight text editor. It does its job. It was worse before it.
If someone wants to improve SC in emacs and vscode, it’s not a problema, it would be good too.
because both on the forum and in private messages / via back-end technical work, I’ve spend maaaaaaaaaany very boring hours trying to resolve and improve some of the issues people had with mailing-list style usage. Many of the major issues have been resolved for a while now - some still exist too. A few people never found a workflow they liked and sadly faded out of participation. However, the forum userbase is significantly larger than the mailing list ever was, and we have significantly fewer problems with email delivery than the mailing lists did, which is obviously a positive.