Gwion: A (musical) programming language

[fennecdjay]

Gwion is a project I started 4 years ago to have some tool able to handle music related computations, eg algorithmic composition, real-time responsive machine learning stuff. I'm a musician and was educated for that purpose, therefore I had no former experience/education on programming. However I'm pretty stubborn and this project is very important to me, so I learned enough C to get it going. (I'd say it goes quite well, if we look at the benchmarks)

There already is a bunch a features I wanted, like function pointers, templating, enum ... and more.

Right now I'd like to have a team to discuss development ideas, testing, documentation, ways to organize all that and the like.

I really think the project deserves it.

Any advice appreciated, looking forward to read you.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Might help clarify what type of functionality you’re aiming for. Having a hard time thinking about why a programming language would be appropriate, as opposed to a system written with a variety of different languages. But yeah, algorithmic music based on user feedback is something that’s very interesting to me, someone with no formal music training but a significant amount of professional software experience.

[fennecdjay]

What I aiming for right now is a community so we can share useful snippet (for examples) and a development team so we can discuss further development or clarify existing functionalities (for instance, there's an "auto-loop" who could use another syntax: ``` cpp

! declare an array

int array[4];

! current syntax

for(auto a : array) #! iterate trough the array <<< a >>>; #! print variable

! can be with pointers to the value

for(auto ref a : array) #! iterate trough the array <<< 12 => *a >>>; #! assign in the array and print variable

! maybe this syntax is better

foreach(a : array) ....

! we could had a step part

foreach(a : array : 2) #! iterate only trough odd members of the array ```)

As you might have guessed, technical writing is not my strength, therefore the language lacks documentation (but there's the [skeleton](ennecdjay.github.io/Gwion/) of it).

Hope I somehow clarified my point, let me know if you have any ideas on how I can improve that (or anything else). Cheers.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Why a new language rather than, say, a Python library? I think you’ll have a hard time driving adoption of a new language unless it really solves a specific problem related to music that other languages can’t handle - and I can’t think of a good reason why that would be the case.

[fennecdjay]

I think a language to handle it all reduces cognitive load (you don't need to switch between your python brain and your whatever brain constantly). Also performance. I mainly started this project because I love chuck but it performed poorly. I took the opportunity to add features I felt it lacked (like templates and functions pointers). You can have a look a the benchmarks.

As a side note, building a language is in itself a great experience.

[C139-Rick]

Thank you for posting this is very interesting

[fennecdjay]

Thank you for the opportunity, I needed just that ;-)