CHAPTER 15

"A Codemy of Errors"

p. 302

Such a function might look as follows in Sonic Pi/Ruby: For anyone interested in going a little deeper, here is the Sonic Pi/Ruby code explained:

define :playseq do \|notes, durations\|

notes.zip(durations).each do \|n,d\|

play n

sleep d

end

end

In the first line we define the function "playseq" and initialize it (i.e. activate it) with a "do" call. The words "notes" and "durations" appear between goalposts at the end of this line to tell the Ruby interpreter (and us) to expect values for these two parameters whenever the function is called—in other words, these are the things we will be working with. Now (line two) we take notes from an as yet unspecified "notes" array and zip() them to corresponding durations from a "durations" array, appending the ".each" method to tell Sonic Pi we want to step through each note-duration pair in sequence: between goalposts at the end of this line, we inform the interpreter we will be referring to individual items in the "notes" array as "n" and in the "durations" array as "d". Finally, in lines three and four we tell Sonic Pi to play each note (n) with the duration (d) we've just zipped to it. The ".each" method in the previous line ensures this happens for each pair of items consecutively until there are none left to play. Functions such as this are sometimes referred to as "subroutines" or "procedures"—and you can see why.

For the record, something similar in Python would look like the below, substituting a print function for play and sleep commands, which obviously have no use in a non-musical language. This function will zip notes to intended durations then print each pair in sequence, within the for loop.

def playseq(notes, durations):

lead_bass = zip(notes, durations)

for full_note in lead_bass:

    print(full_note)

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Ruby code is handsome, I think: Its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (or "Matz" to Rubyites) claims to have been motivated by twin dislikes of Perl, which "had the smell of a toy language," and Python, which he considered an object-oriented paradigm imposter. see The Ruby Language FAQ, What is the History of Ruby? Intriguingly, in an ACM Turing Award lecture from 2003, Alan Kay, generally regarded as the creator of Object Oriented Programming, appears to feel that his idea has never been completely realized, presumably even by Ruby.

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the opening of whose Tenebrae Responsoria comprises eight of the most beautiful bars of music I have ever heard: Especially as sung by The Hilliard Ensemble on their ECM album Tenebrae. This has long been a go-to album for mornings when I'm writing. For anyone interested, others that flavored this book were Brian Eno's Top Boy soundtrack, along with his "thinking music" records Reflections and Lux, plus his and brother Roger's lush Mixing Colors; Plaid's Reachy Prints; Autechre's Sign; The Hilliard Ensemble's Bach/Webern mashup, Ricercar; John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard; Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; Vijay Iyer's Break Stuff; Nils Frahm's All Melody. Would these therefore enhance the reading of the book they flavored? I'd be interested to know the results of any experiments in this regard!

its own discrete coding environment: Typically this is known as an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, basically an editor with bells on, that can only be used with its own domain specific language (DSL.)

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Consult venv documentation and watch helpful YouTube tutorial: This one from an estimable collection by Corey Shafer.

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what I like about Atom: Alas, Atom is also doomed. In 2022 GitHub announced it would no longer develop or support it—one thing new coders have to get used to is their favorite tools being deemed obsolete by the people who made them. Atom's fate was probably sealed by the wild success of the brilliant VS Code editor, which is also open source and maintained by Microsoft (GitHub is owned by Microsoft.)