Professional audio engineers do their work by FEELING the position of the equipment, making adjustments, and LISTENING to the results. And they expect the feedback to be instant -- just like playing a musical instrument.
Now put them in front of a command line and imagine if they had to type out their intents, listen to the results, and then make tweaks to their typed-in textual program to effect some change in the audio output. You'd end up with a bored, pissed, unproductive audio engineer. The sliders and switches made digital audio professionals MORE productive, not less -- even more so when they became controls on a physical console with digital outputs, as it put controlling the digital gear back in the analog realm a musician is already familiar with.
I find it also interesting that lab environments and music are where plenty of programming takes place by people who are not occupational programmers -- and much of it is visual, in environments like LabVIEW and Max/MSP. This is the future of programming. It is why we should listen to those who say we are too bound to a textual representation for our programs and that in order for the craft to evolve, a richer representation must be embraced.
Only to someone who's never mixed a song.
Professional audio engineers do their work by FEELING the position of the equipment, making adjustments, and LISTENING to the results. And they expect the feedback to be instant -- just like playing a musical instrument.
Now put them in front of a command line and imagine if they had to type out their intents, listen to the results, and then make tweaks to their typed-in textual program to effect some change in the audio output. You'd end up with a bored, pissed, unproductive audio engineer. The sliders and switches made digital audio professionals MORE productive, not less -- even more so when they became controls on a physical console with digital outputs, as it put controlling the digital gear back in the analog realm a musician is already familiar with.
I find it also interesting that lab environments and music are where plenty of programming takes place by people who are not occupational programmers -- and much of it is visual, in environments like LabVIEW and Max/MSP. This is the future of programming. It is why we should listen to those who say we are too bound to a textual representation for our programs and that in order for the craft to evolve, a richer representation must be embraced.