Beginning ChucK

What a lovely language, this ChucK.

While it might seem like a detriment that the language is still incomplete and under heavy development, the situation is actually quite dreamy. The language is still in a state of simplicity. You can learn the majority of ChucK and its functions in a single day. It is decently well documented. But beyond all that, it works... well, most of the time. Let me contrast this for a moment with ChucK's conceptual older sibling, SuperCollider.

I have been trying to wrap my head around SuperCollider for the past few years and just now feel like I understand the syntax. I have spent days on SuperCollier trying to get a single sample to play over and over on a trigger without much success. Search the SC mailing list archives turns up very little, and I personally find the wikis and documention on the language and its usage scattered, incomplete, and downright confusing... not that the community has not tried to get it together. For my own purposes, the final blow was the lack of a SC command line interface. As far as I can tell, you must use the SuperCollider language environment to execute scripts and send them to servers.

I will write more about ChucK as I get further into it, but on first blush I'm smitten. For all its incompleteness it is a simple and expressive language (although required semicolons are lame).