Pd as a programming platform

Documentation

With PDDP, there is now a big push to come up with a whole system of documentation for Pd. Think of it as a complete, interactive manual written in Pd. A large part of this effort is to create free, open-source workshops complete with teachers' guides, so that Pd can be taught by anyone who has the inclination.

Standard libraries

There is a ton of great code contributed by a large amount of people, mostly in the form of "external" objects. The next step is to organize this code into a set of standard libraries, much like Java's.

These libraries are just starting to be sketched out and implemented. You can follow the progress here: http://puredata.info/dev/PdLibraries

Terminology

A programming language needs to have clearly defined terminology so that when people talk about that langauge, they can easily understand each other. Pd is currently in a state of flux, with the addition of a namespace, and the ability to write objects in numerous languages, including Pd itself. Therefore the terminology is also changing. Traditional Max/Pd words like abstraction or external are not very clear any more. An abstraction is a class written in Pd. More and more, there is no real difference between a class written in C or C++, and a class written in Pd (i.e. an abstraction). Therefore the term abstraction is loosing its distinctive meaning. Instead everything is a class, whether its written in Pd or any other language.

Namespace

Pd now has a very basic, working namespace. You can use an infinite amount of objects with the same name as long as they are called using their namespace prefix. This is very much a fledgling effort, we are still working out how it will ultimately look. The next big step is to implement a per-file namespace, so that each class can have a distinct namespace. Right now, there is only a global namespace.

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