I admit I was playing devils advocate a bit in my commentary.

Nice overview article. As you can tell my impressions were set from the relatively early stages of LC at least as a movement over the last 10 years. There always will be smart folks operating in any niche and I did run into Alberto de Campo back then, but unfortunately I didn't have much opportunity for deeper conversations at the time.

Thanks for the discussion and I'll definitely try and update my thinking towards LC as certainly things have progressed a bit over the last 10 years. I'm all for folks working on specialized clients / language environments which increase the expressiveness of LC in dealing with more complex abstractions and perhaps where applicable less piecing together of fairly standard control structures. I think that is the big tester for LC from a tech / performance environment perspective. The data sets one may operate over may have to be planned in advance, but use LC to dynamically choose immediate results, etc.

Ah a bit anecdotal, but puts some things in perspective:

I started with SuperCollider 2 and when 3 hit it was a liberating experience as it freed me up to deal with the synthesis server directly and immediately the day or two after I fired up SC3 I jettisoned usage of sclang and started on my own client which turned into quite a bit more. It is still in active development every moment I can get in on it though for a long time it's been much broader than just an SC client.

A lot of the compositional abstractions that interest me aren't really possible to realistically control in performance with live coding and certainly are tremendously aided by visualization especially during performance. I suppose my approach is a combination of planfulness which exposes a refined interface that makes liveness possible sans the need for LC while maintaining plenty of improvisational opportunities. One could always combine this route with LC though where applicable. Mostly the stuff that requires planfulness has to do with large scale 2D / 3D spatialization, but also real time synthesis for game audio / 3D engines is a completely different area of my R&D.

I have a studio which features a 32 speaker hemisphere of speakers (talk about a crazy hacker den). As things go though it's been an outright struggle maintaining things over the last 5 years and this has pulled me away from almost all computer music oriented audio R&D let alone performance / composition which is terribly frustrating because it took me years to build and self-fund the studio and now that I have access to what I need; well, you get the idea... It doesn't help that I've also been doing all of this in more or less isolation for the most part especially last 5 years. That is good and bad and is definitely not the recommended course to take for most, but I had an idea of what I was getting into from the get go. The final results will be unique, but a challenge on many levels to get there. I had to disengage from the local scene / stop promoting as part of financially covering obligations of keeping the studio operational. It looks like I'll lose 2014 to this route as well, but I may finally have a major product breakthrough (next gen Android video engine) that could finally relax the financial burden; after 10+ years of bootstrapping... ::oomph::

So, yeah.. Hopefully in the coming years I can get back to more audio R&D and back on the live performance horse so to speak and perhaps even drop into / by the algorave scene.. :)