I like ChucK but...

Mies · Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK

First off, kudos to the development team - ChucK is a worthy alternative to Supercollider (that is, AFAIK, unfortunately not available on XP apart from an old, very buggy and incomplete port).

However, am I the only one who finds programming in Chuck frustrating? It is an object oriented language but it doesn't appear to support correctly some fundamental OO features such as overloading for example...

Ultimately, I went back coding Java externals in Max/MSP (with the added benefits of a good user interface and a larger community).

Just my experience - I wonder if other ChucK-ers(?) have had a similar one?

Mies · Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK

Where are my manners!?!!

I wanted to thank Kassen for creating this forum - great idea!

Kassen · Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 12:29 pm Post subject:

In fact; ChucK does support overloading functions. From the manual, page 50;

majutsu · Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 12:35 pm Post subject:

i feel your pain, mies.

i also feel the same way about sc3. which is buggy and weird. plus windows not having cocoa classes is a pain in terms of communication with others. but you can use java . . . Wink

i too look at max/msp as my likely resting point for composing and performing. especially since the windows port is very, very stable now.

that being said i think chucK is seriously revolutionary and cool, sure to be of tremendous value as a grand experiment if nothing else. and perhaps in the future, with improvements, a whole lot more than a quirky experiment, maybe a radically novel tool for music.

Mies · Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK

I understand Chuck is still in its infancy. It also is not a commercial product with a bunch of professional developers behind it so my allusion/indirect comparison to Max/MSP was unfair.

I know from the manual that overloading is officially supported but it seems that it breaks in some cases.
I wrote a public class to be the superclass for a set of related models I wanted to implement. I also declared a bunch of "abstract" methods (as ChucK doesn't support abstract methods per se, I simply left their bodies pretty much empty).
While implementing the models, I overloaded these methods (i.e., changed their signature) and that's when the compiler refused to compile some of the overloaded ones (no obvious reason - all public accessors). Finally. I gave up on my original idea to create a class hierarchy and coded all the models as completely separate entities.
Arguably, correct OO behaviour is not paramount in a programming language designed to write music applications but still...

Thanks to your creating this thread, I checked the ChucK website and noticed 1.2.0.6 has been released - I'll give it another try as I was using 1.2.0.5 at the time.

As I put in the thread subject, I like ChucK (two main reasons: it is pretty lightweight, and I'm truly impressed by the way time is handled!)

Mies · Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK

Kassen · Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 1:19 pm Post subject:

hmmm, I don't fully understand what you were trying to do but there were/are indeed some issues with functions within public classes and I see no reason why there couldn't be overloaded functions within publc classes, that could be quite usefull indeed. If it still doesn't work in the latest version it might be a good idea to report on this with example code that should but doesn't work but is syntactically correct.

If I were you I'd document a simple case of this and send it to the list.

Mies · Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK