Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 4 May 2022 at 12:30:13 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> at math. But making it sound good is a bit more art than 
> science i reckon. I guess at the end of the day because its 
> being used to make art and that is a much more subjective realm.

Yes, that art aspect is what makes this field interesting too, as 
there is no objectively right and wrong tool. If you can enable 
artists to create new "modes" of expression, you have a success! 
(Even if it as simple as setting all lower bits to zeros in a 
bitcrusher.)

Same thing in visuals, when the researchers got bored with 
photo-realistic rendering and started looking at 
non-photo-realistic rendering you also open up for endless new 
possibilities of artistic toolmaking.

> It's just that building blocks in an FM synthesiser are quite 
> simple, at least conceptually, I reckon I could knock one up in 
> about 30 minutes, just the audio part anyway. Even the math is 
> pretty straight forward, what sidebands you'll get etc...

Yes, I agree. I only mentioned it because it is difficult to find 
areas where you can point to one person doing it all on his own. 
Also, doing computer music at this time on mainframes must have 
been tedious! The most well known tool from that time period is 
[Music V](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Music-V), which has an 
open source successor in [CSound](https://csound.com/). The 
latter actually has an online IDE that one can play with for fun: 
https://ide.csound.com/


> That's engineering though isn't it, the higher you get up 
> complexity wise, the more you're building on work done by other 
> people. It doesn't mean we should only be impressed by people 
> who lay foundations.

Sure, any tool that enable artists to create new expressions more 
easily are valuable, but is quite rare that something has not 
been tried in the past, or something close to it.