The Zen of Pure Data

I have been mulling over the idea of writing a guide for Pure Data aimed at developers proficient in at least one other more mainstream programming language. Pure Data is so different than many other programming environments, yet its utility is such that I keep coming back to it despite the difficulties in managing code written in it using traditional techniques.

I’ve written a couple of posts in the past dealing with things like connection order and event processing precedence. However, the little oddities of PD run pretty deep, and I’m afraid that it is quite an involved subject to start in on.

Plenty of other books have been written on PD in the past, and I don’t think I want to write just another PD book. I think there has been enough written on general signal processing techniques and also on programming PD in general. There are some idiomatic things in PD that come up again and again, and I don’t think I’ve seen a concise guide for PD aimed at programmers that already code in other languages and already are familiar with signal processing in general.

Here is a rough list of topics I might cover if I write such a guide:

Processing order

Subpatching

Bang vs everything else

Lists, atoms and messages

Top down, left right (sort of)

Functional PD

That’s a good start. I’ll add to this list soon hopefully.