Vvvv – A hybrid visual/textual development environment
vvvv.org
vvvv.org
But I later discovered that the more mainstream ones are puredata and its commercial version max/msp. for sound design I also use: supercollider and csound.
After some years, I felt that I still preferred text-based interaction while I need some even simpler live coding or prototyping tool. so I made https://glicol.org/.
for visuals, I would recommend:
and
Note that these are not replaceable for each other, you can look at them all
Do you know of anything in the live coding space that can handle recording/looping/mangling of external audio gear? (as is sampling, not MIDI)
maybe sonic pi can do what you require.
that's actually a feature on my todo list, as I'd love to have some digital reverb for my Eurorack.
I also recently learned you can force hydra to spit out the GLSL code, which is a pretty cool feature.
so if you think vvvv is not propertly marketed, maybe will benefit from a mission statement, then it's not for you.
actually vvvv is about 10 years older.
I have a lot of feelings about this movement, and I'm happy that I was a part of it. It's driven my feelings about music and art in general, and I've spent a ton of my time since then trying to figure out how to make things that put music first while still containing the cold stochasticity of this time.
I found a great set of pictures on Flickr from ~2007-2008: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oblaat/with/3062581867
https://www.flickr.com/groups/node08/pool
similar vibe.
i really don't know how to contextualize that experience. i'm glad i was part of it, but like a lot of things immediately pre-pervasive digitalization, i feel like it will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Vvvv – a live-programming environment for easy prototyping and development (June 5, 2016 — 187 points, 36 comments)
Vvvv – A Multipurpose Toolkit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013162 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
Vvvv – a live-programming environment for easy prototyping and development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842176 - June 2016 (36 comments)
Vvvv: A hybrid visual/textual live-programming environment for easy prototyping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179648 - March 2015 (3 comments)
Celebrity birthday wishes to vvvv's 10th anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972179 - Dec 2012 (1 comment)
VVVV.js - the VVVV language ported to JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813713 - July 2011 (10 comments)
It has been years since I used it, windows 7 actually, but their community had an old school "irc with angry sages" feel.
It seems weird that out of all the showcases, there's not anything like normal industry projects. No games, no movies, no television shows. Lots of museum displays, AI scultures, art walls.
Take Blender instead https://www.blender.org/features/ and its almost entirely "industry production pipeline" and "award winning shorts and films". Or Maya, which is pretty much nothing other than "used in Hogwarts, used in Avengers, used in Dune." Notably, not very many art walls or digi-scultures.
Usually its a chicken and egg thing, like nobody uses it, because nobody famous has used it yet, except vvvv looks like it has plenty of users.
The way it works seems to appeal to "artists" / "creatives". It's pretty simple to get a visual output fast and the always running (hot-reload) aspect makes it easy to iterate on things, tweak some parameter (size, speed, color) and directly see the outcome.
> normal industry projects
It's used quite a lot in the context of trade fairs, not only for touchscreen exhibits but also stage shows. Nice example: https://nsynk.de/work/mercedes-iaa15
There are also totally different kinds of projects/uses, they are just not that well documented. For example I know of a guy that programmed a feeding robot for a fish farm using vvvv.
> nobody famous
There is at least one "famous" user :)
If you have further questions feel free to join their matrix chat:
Had not heard of Anadol (not much involvement in the pro art community), yet working with the sphere in Vegas probably means at least fairly well known.
When the latter was released it was still missing a lot of the functionality and libraries beta has, not sure how it is these days.
Is it actually a renderer?
It does a better job at explaining things.
We had it hooked up to MIDI, time code, video, motion tracking and DMX lighting. Pretty impressive for the time, now I think about it.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_graph_architecture
[2]https://github.com/TheFuseLab/VL.Fuse
[3]https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/extending/overview.ht...
[4]https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/libraries/3d/shaders....
If you have a project that needs lights, video, lasers, sound, motion, cameras, exotic sensors etc and speed of creation is maybe more important than long-term stability, something like this might allow you to sketch your way to a solution significantly faster. The real code is always underneath, but it's kind of like having some kind of flow diagram, sketch tool, visual debugger and IDE.
The creative coding 'scene' (at least when I felt part of it) is loosely divided between patcher tools and traditional code-based tooling. vvvv is a patcher, like Max/MSP, PureData and Touchdesigner. You connect function blocks together to do stuff, you can see the data flow between and see the visuals they create. Like creating shaders at a high level of abstraction, I guess.
More code-based languages and frameworks include:
[1] openFrameworks https://openframeworks.cc/ C++
[2] Processing https://processing.org/ Java or JavaScript
[3] Nannou https://nannou.cc/ Rust
I oscillate between "it's a dreadful local minima that people get trapped in because real programming is so genuinely intimidating and hard to crack" and something more like "of wet could figure out how to take the good bits from visual and textual coding and avoid the worst bits of each, then we will reach the promised land".
Or something like that.
This also applies to things like excel or databases.
Surely, one could implement a reaktor patch or a spreadsheet in their favorite language, but that doesn’t mean much.
As for other systems (audio and video tools) kinda yeah but no. There's some nice aspects to visualizing the data flow but that's something that can be implemented as a feature to text-based programming. Actual editing is more laborious and many tasks that are simple with text are complex in all the visual tools I've tried.
I'm not saying visual tools have no advantages over text - I just feel that the cost is very high indeed and we should really be looking for a synthesis that gives us the best of both worlds.
So there is a “but”.
Traditional programming also has a but: it can do anything a spreadsheet can, but it is often overkill. Spreadsheets etc are waaaaaaay faster and safer for 90% or more of the work.
> I just feel that the cost is very high indeed and we should really be looking for a synthesis that gives us the best of both worlds
But normal people is happy with the specific solutions in the meantime.
Maybe there will be a proper visual language paradigm that will end all textual languages the future, sure, but in the meantime, comparing visual languages with this impossible utopic silver bullet is unfair and limiting.
I'm not discussing whether they are "happy". I'm arguing that Visual Programming comes with some massive drawbacks. Whether people are aware of them or not is irrelevant. There's such a thing as being contentedly stuck in a local minima.
I believe that there are objective drawbacks (to both approaches actually). Whether you currently enjoy using them or not doesn't have much bearing on the point that things could be much better.
And textual programming comes with even bigger drawbacks.
I don't want to care about programming things like memory, time complexity, nulls, or code style when I'm programming a synth patch in Max or Reaktor, or when writing a spreadsheet. If needed, I can just use a compiler.
> many tasks that are simple with text are complex in all the visual tools I've tried.
And many tasks that are simple with visual programming are incredibly complex with textual programming.
There is a reason people use it, and part of it about embracing the paradigm, rather than trying to emulate what you already know in it.
None of these are specific to text vs visual. Except maybe "code style" and that has a direct analogue in visual programming (and arguably one that's harder to manage).
> If needed, I can just use a compiler.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this is another orthogonal concern.
> And many tasks that are simple with visual programming are incredibly complex with textual programming.
I never said otherwise.
> There is a reason people use it, and part of it about embracing the paradigm, rather than trying to emulate what you already know in it.
There most certainly are very good reasons to use visual programming. But that doesn't make the pain points disappear.
I'm not sure how to put this any clearer but what I'm trying to say "They both suck. I think we can do better..."
The best part of 4v is the community and the node festival. Lots of amazing techno artists.
The hours we wasted trying to lock them down.