Over the past few months I have helped my brother-in-law create a Clavinet Clone for musical keyboards. Those of you who know me are undoubtedly laughing at the image of me creating a musical instrument because I have no rhythm, no timing, no ear, and generally musical ability of any kind.
But, I do have over 20 years of programming experience, and I haven’t worked with someone who knows “just enough to be dangerous” in a long long time. So I was surprised by some of the lesions.
Source Control Is Not Intuitive
Older source control systems like CVS were pretty simple, but didn’t support distributed development. Git, on the other hand, is complicated. Each time we did a handoff, I would make a branch, develop, and merge back to main.
When I handed it back, my brother-in-law would copy the file, append “-new” and continue. Every handover resulted in new copies of the files. Sometimes entire directories would be copied and get “-old” added to the name.
Branching, merging, and visual diffs may be second nature to full time developers, everyone else is going to need lesions.
IDEs Will Spoil You
The code is in Kontakt scripting language, which is an internally designed and developed scripting language. I would do my development in Sublime Text, then switch over to the UI to compile and test.
This got old after the 3rd syntax error. A 15 second code-to-compile loop wasn’t bad back in 1992; now I just wanted syntax highlighting.
Custom Scripting Languages Make Everything Harder
Custom scripting languages make everything harder. They make it harder on the implementer because they have to build and maintain a custom scripting language. They make it harder on users because they have to learn a new language.
A language with minimal functionality, limited documentation, and few examples. The biggest time waster is the lack of a testing framework.
With all that said, the Kontakt scripting language may not have been a mistake. The same code and controls work on physical and virtual keyboards. Getting code to work consistently on multiple hardware platforms is no small feat.
If You Can’t Have Tests, Commit Continuously
Continuous committing and diffs are a poor way to handle regressions, but they are better than nothing. If you’re ever in this situation, make your commits as small and targeted as possible. Regressions will still be frustratingly common and tedious, but at least you will be able to step back through your changes.
Learning Things Sounds Great!
You can buy the best sounding Clavinet Clone here!
Full disclosure: I helped program it, it belongs to my brother-in-law, and I do not get a commission.