extempore VS dale

I've use a few "live coding" programming environments focused around audio programming where this is also the norm. Extempore ( https://github.com/digego/extempore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c ) is a great example of this.

I grew up in the 70s with the term cybernetics from Norber Wiener, and I liked it before Gibson's Neuromancer in the 80s, so I guess I was inoculated before the pandemic use of the word. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a term being bandied about a bit now (reading Logical Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems, and it is pretty cool [1]; Andrew Sorensen's Extempore as a CPS environment [2]). I also attended the first HOPE in 1994 in NYC and although the press abused the term cyber, it's still cool to me! But the Papa John's stuff was funny.

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-63588-0

[2] https://github.com/digego/extempore

Check out https://github.com/digego/extempore by Andrew Sorenson

Extempore

I'm really fond of the idea of writing music like this.

From all available implementations of the idea, I probably like Extempore (https://github.com/digego/extempore) the most. Extempore provides a low-level C-like language (xtlang) which compiles into LLVM and can be meta-programmed from a variant of Scheme (TinyScheme I believe). This arrangement makes it possible to generate the code for the audio graph from Scheme, compile/optimize it via LLVM, then drive it in a live-coding fashion from Emacs. Best of both worlds (high and low).

My personal, much simpler attempt in this space is Cowbells (https://github.com/omkamra/cowbells) - with this one you can live-code FluidSynth (MIDI soundfonts) from Clojure + CIDER + Emacs, representing musical phrases either via Clojure data structures or an alternative text-based syntax (which is translated into the former by a compiler).

There's Dale, Extempore (more particularly, XTlang which is the statically-typed part of Extempore), Carp, and one more that I can't remember right now that basically maps to C++, more-or-less directly.

>However, there are LISP flavored versions of C

For anyone interested the example given is from https://github.com/tomhrr/dale

Dale: Basically C, but using Lisp syntax, support for macros, which might segfault, not beginner friendly at all.

Carp, Lux and Dale are 3 I'm familiar with.There's also Dylan, though that one dropped its parentheses. But if we go by the brackets, technically, we can argue that any expression-based languages is a Lisp. I once wrote a Lisp to JS transpile whose output had more parens than the input. :)

Dale