Re: [sc-users] Studying source

[jamshark70@xxxxxxxxx]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 5:37 AM <znmeb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When someone tells me to "read the source code", that means they are
> unwilling to write tutorials. That doesn't grow a community and it's
> discouraging to hear about software as popular and useful as
> SuperCollider.

This is quite an out-of-context remark.

The original comment was paraphrased as "if we're interested in how
SuperCollider handles sound from the bottom we ought to study the C++
code."

Tutorials are generally about usage. But the question is about
internals and implementation. Typically, if one is interested in
internals, one has probably long outgrown introductory tutorials. So,
willingness or unwillingness to write tutorials has just about nothing
to do with the question that was asked.

In fact, James McCartney *did* ship tutorials with SC2 and the early
versions of SC3. They are... difficult to follow. Some of them still
exist: [Streams-Patterns-Events](http://doc.sccode.org/Browse.html#Tutorials%3EStreams-Patterns-Events)
-- but I'd be very surprised if you found this easier to understand
than my own [Practical Guide to
Patterns](http://doc.sccode.org/Browse.html#Streams-Patterns-Events%3EA-Practical-Guide).
(It's often the case that brilliant programmers are not especially
good technical writers -- in the end, you might not want the original
author of the software to be solely responsible for documentation.)

In any case, the community has had tutorials covered for quite some time now.

@clfest Another entry point into SC's C++ codebase is to pick a
favorite UGen and find it under ./server/plugins (I usually grep for
the UGen name).

hjh

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