Yes! This is a very important question! Because I wouldn’t fire up Max to make a filesystem or do DSP in java. What languages do is an extremely important part of understanding what they are and when to use them. If TouchDesigner is just a graphical python, I’ll stick to python. But from the excitement around it, I gather it does something differently. What is it?
You mention, for example, that it’s used mostly for multimedia applications. Why is that? Is it particularly well suited to that? What does multimedia mean in this context? Does it route audio? Process audio? DSP? Video? Do I paint with it? Sculpt? Can it work in clay? Oils?
If someone asked me to explain Max I’d say “It’s a programing environment originally for rapidly prototyping musical ideas with MIDI that has, over the years, been expanded to be very capable at DSP, generated graphics, and now has an embedded version running in Live such that whole plugins can be designed in it.” If someone asked why they would want to use it, I’d say “if you want to focus on routing, processing, and trigging audio in generative or programatic ways without having to build all the tricky realtime dependencies that entails, the Max environment has that all set up for you, lets you manipulate it with an elegant visual programming language, and deploy the results seamlessly in Live.”
Why is it so hard to give a similar definition for TouchDesigner? Is it just more broad than that? Can it really be used for much more? Is it more similar to python in this respect than I am giving it credit for?
