First steps towards live-coding

As you might know (e. g. hearing the notes the player on the left-hand side plays), I make music. I mainly use ChucK for this purpose, which is a quite simple but functional and well-designed programming language. However, there has been a big limitation in efficiency: I actually had to write down every single note and volume change, filter frequency sweep by my own hands as nasty old numbers in Java-like code. I hope that time has finally ended.

Today I succeeded to connect a very simple Java UI to ChucK via OSC messages (thanks to this post). Now I plan to write my own UI's ("instruments") in Java, generate OSC events with them and record them using the accurate timing built into ChucK. Then I'll use Ruby to generate ChucK code again from the events I recorded. So there goes feedback, too. I'll feel like a real pro... and it all cost nothing, only a little coding experience...

On programming languages

I read some articles about the dangers that C++ can have for an average programmer, and that we'd better go on and get Java or C# for our projects. Well, I can only agree that it's easier to write code in Java than in C++. But the quality of the product we have to release does not always depend on how easy it was to produce it.

I am the maintainer and team leader for a 300k+ loc. C++ project. If it works it's not because of the language, it's because of the tests we run. If it fails, it's not because of the language either, it's because of the tests we haven't run.

I don't believe that a software product will be more reliable just because it's written in a "higher-level" language. It's reliable and stable because almost all of its functionality has been tried or even stress-tested.