Help me learn to code in CHUCK

JamesE · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

I fucked around with basic when I was 10

how do I understand how to write in this?

Mr. Business · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: Hiding

If you've already got it installed and have compiled an example program to confirm that your installation works, then I advise reading through this in order until you get confused. Then you should write a program to play with the confusing concept until you finally understand it.

Anyway, that advice probably isn't very helpful if you're not a coder, because many of those concepts might be unfamiliar to you. I'll write more as I understand more.

edit: okay, the arithmetic syntax is very C-like. This shouldn't be too bad.

edit2: assignment statements in this are pretty odd.

edit3: okay, what exactly do you want to do with this language?
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JamesE · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

I'd like to make sex party music for depressed robots

or something that sounds dead 1970s sci-fi movie

Mr. Business · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: Hiding

Jeez, see, my inability to understand anything about sound or music puts me in an akward place here.
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JamesE · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

I just want to know how this style of language works and what the basics are, really. I can't make head or tails of the structure.

Mr. Business · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: Hiding

Oh my, this looks very similar to C, but it's backwards.

Also, it seems that you need to learn all the uses for the "Chuck" operator, which is this: =>

For instance

Let's say we wanna make an integer number and give it an initial value of 0, we'd write

Mr. Business · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: Hiding

Shit, I understand what maybe two or three of the code examples do. Someone who understands both code and music should help this man, because I am out of my league. Music and sound are things that I know all of nothing about.
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!= · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: the planet of leather moomins

Mr Business, you are approaching it from the wrong side.

Chunk is not about variables or much about control structures. It's about building networks / circuits of signals, and controlling time.

The two main aspects of chuck are:
- The chuck operator connects sources, sinks and filters of signals of varying types.
- It let you write temporal events in a straightforward way. It's more straightforward because the loop that is inherent in all realtime/audio producing network is completely abstracted out.

The public of chuck is people who got fed up fidling with MAX/MSP, which presents those network of signals in a more blatant way: graphically.

Toups · tyranically banal Joined: 03 Dec 2006 Location: Ebon Keep

I'm interested in this. Is this a difficult language to learn?

I used to sort of know C, once!

Sort of!
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Mr. Business · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: Hiding

Hot Stott Bot · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

This is pretty great. My elegance-meter is going to 11!

I would've used a different operator to advance time (unless there's a hidden symmetry with the normal usage I'm not seeing), but that's a quibble.

Hot Stott Bot · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

Broco, calm down!

This is basically how most video and audio editing languages and such work.

Broco · Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Headquarters

Ah, I'd never seen one, I'm not really familiar with the field. But the thing did win a bunch of prizes at conferences, it must have some innovation to it.

EDIT: I'm looking into other popular sound design packages, but I'm still really impressed with Chuck. Other packages gain their power by expanding out into a complicated GUI, and any feature which is not explicitly provided isn't present; Chuck just unified everything into a dead simple text-based syntax and vast power and programmability emerge naturally from that. It's the difference between Visual Basic and Lisp.

Not to say that I think Chuck is "the best" and will take over (has Lisp taken over?), but it certainly appeals greatly to my sensibilities. I'm the sort who likes to do my word processing in Latex and my rendering in Pov-Ray, so...

Hot Stott Bot · banned Joined: 05 Dec 2006

Yeah it is probably a particularly good one... but well, hmm, "audio/video languages" are kind of a weird subfield. Most people who do actual audio/video use higher level programs that basically work on the same concepts (streaming, piping, input, output, etc., etc.) but are in big sophisticated GUIs.

Those are often designed in such languages, though!

Take, for instance, the fact that like half of the major video editing tools are written using AVISynth!

Still, it is a weird little subfield where a/v nerd meets computer nerd!

!= · Joined: 04 Dec 2006 Location: the planet of leather moomins

People using chuck are the same sort of people who are into Live coding

Slub for instance uses (or at least at the time used) Perl to do live coding / music performances. (see http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/08/31/livecode.html)

A group on this topic was formed, called TOPLAP. (http://toplap.org/index.php/Main_Page)