[Bf-committers] Proposal for unifying nodes

[Yves Poissant]

From: "Brecht Van Lommel" <brecht at blender.org>

> I have worked with functional programming languages, and see the
> benefits, but this is not about developers. Implementation is mostly
> irrelevant for this discussion in my opinion, both approaches will work
> fine at the level. It is about the UI for users, what the effects of
> such a functional design will be and if they will actually benefit from
> it.

I totally agree. What I wanted to point is that the discussion was going on 
two very different levels trying to oppose one level against the other. And 
it turned out equating "functional paradigm" to bad design through 
borderline use cases arguments. Bad design is bad design no matter the 
paradigm used to program something.

From: "Nathan Vegdahl" <cessen at cessen.com>

>    But the node system inherently is not going to be as powerful as a
> functional language (or any other language), because it's a DAG, and
> therefore no recursion is possible (a primary construction in any
> purely functional language).  In fact, loops in general are not
> possible except when strictly kept inside single nodes (for example,
> looping over light sources to calculate shading).

I'm looking around and I don't see anybody suggesting that the nodes turn 
into a full functional visual programming language. (although, on second 
thought... (joking)).

Yves