SuperDirt VS FoxDot

Tidalcycles actually runs SuperCollider as its sound backend, through the SuperDirt library: https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt/

Another excellent Haskell based live-coding tool: https://tidalcycles.org/

Even if you don't know Haskell, it is a delight to improvise electronic music with this library. It comes with its own mini-language for dealing with musical patterns and can synchronize with any instrument. Very extensible, the backend uses https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt, a SuperCollider extension for dealing with synths / samples / effects.

Cl-collider is really nice. However, I’m trying to design something so that I can be free from SuperCollider one day. I already programmed a library in Python targeting SuperDirt for live-coding. The drawback is that I’m now dependant on SuperCollider for almost any kind of I/O (OSC pass through SC and out, as well as MIDI).

Thanks! I used a python library called Foxdot: https://foxdot.org/

My comment won't really be helpful, but it feels like an interesting question to spitball some thoughts...

1. The domain is super important for children's programming. Logo started out doing list processing and word-based games and kids just weren't that into it; it's the turtle that really made it feel real and exciting. Scratch similarly has a really concrete and fun domain (moving sprites). The exact things that good learning environments have (lots of visuals and movement) don't seem very fun when you are blind (though maybe there's ways to experience that output that I'm not aware of).

2. My natural intuition is that voice and music are fun. Maybe there's tactile things I am unaware of. Maybe Lego Mindstorms?

3. FoxDot is a really fun programming environment for creating live music: https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot – it's very textual, and I'm not sure how easy that is (especially if you are trying to interact while the music is playing). It's based on Supercollider: https://supercollider.github.io/ – it's possible there's other more accessible frontends for Supercollider.

4. Here's something someone did with Supercollider: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-technology-set-up-a-...

5. That reminds me of Makey Makey, which is very tactile and very affordable. But it's basically just an input device. https://makeymakey.com/ – really you can't go wrong getting that and hooking it up to a sound player or having the kid find new and inventive ways to create tactile frontends to it. I'm sure other kids will be impressed with what this kid comes up with. Here's a page on using it with blind kids: https://www.perkins.org/resource/makey-makey-stem-activities...

6. It's OK if it's not "programming" IMHO. Building things with computers is fun and good learning. Giving the kid a new medium to build things is important, with or without complicated logic. I think there is a benefit to what I'll call more inclusively "coding" which is representing your goals and thoughts in some special format, like HTML or music notation or whatever.

7. Speech input and output in the browser is pretty easy and accessible. But I don't know of anything that brings all that together in a programming-like experience. Using GPT I bet there's something possible and not super complicated that could be created today that couldn't have happened a year ago.

FoxDot is probably what you're looking for.

https://foxdot.org/

As for software, I think the 2 most popular live coding environments are FoxDot (which is Python based and works well with Troop), and Sonic Pi (which I don't think has "multiplayer"). Its been a while since I looked into this style of beat making, so maybe things have changed. But these are good places to start.

PureData is a hell of a rabbit hole! You might also want to check out SuperCollider which is more modern. If you want to skip to the fun stuff there's FoxDot and SonicPi. Both are live coding environments built on SuperCollider.

If you want more info on how to code music in python check our website [crashserver.fr] or [FoxDot] - main project in python

you can make cool music with FoxDot and Supercollider

FoxDot

Not sure how they compare feature-wise, but take a look at FoxDot:

https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot