User talk:Trogramming

Introduction

10/08/2024 Just set up the account recently. I'm still getting my head around the Xen Wiki Rules, I've been making my way through the help and conventions. I'm hoping to try and expand the https://en.xen.wiki/w/Programming page, since its empty.

Most new musical ideas I develop through programming. I have minimal musical training from back in childhood so most of my musical abstractions were learned via programming. As such I have a rather large code base with a lot of relevant stuff, but I don't know whether I should upload the articles to my own user page, and let more experienced editors choose what's worthy of adding to the programming page.

I also want to know whether it's okay to upload code as is, or if I should use pseduocode, I think many things would require both an imperative and functional approach, and in some cases prolog could do some unique things particularly with musical indeterminacy or any tasks where more complex grammars are involved. Preferably I would write things in vanilla python with types forward declared as comments, or in C++.

Please reach out if you're willing to help me learn the ropes I've never editted a wiki.

Hi! First of all, I invite you to join the XA Discord server, if you're not there already. I find it easier to help new users over there, since we can have real-time discussions, but we can chat here if you don't use Discord.

Don't worry about editing in the main namespace if you're contributing content that naturally expands the "standard framework" (see Xenharmonic Wiki:Conventions#Original research. I often redirect new users to work in their user spaces, but that's usually because they started crafting their own pet theories and such (i.e. theory which doesn't tie in with existing theory as much), but otherwise it's fine to work on existing pages. It's a wiki, therefore (almost) every page is a perpetual work-in-progress, and even if you put in something half-done, you can always add a todo box using Template:Todo (see documentation on that page) and finish later, or let people add to what you've been able to contribute.

It is possible to include code on wiki pages, and there is even a way to enable syntax highlighting. In general, large amounts of code should be hosted on code hosting platforms like GitHub (and links to those can be provided on the wiki, of course), but short code snippets/algorithms may be included for explanatory or practical purposes.

As for wiki editing, there are already many tips in Help:Editing, but I'll add a few according to what I see here. First, when you create a new talk page, it will open the editor as for any page. However, talk pages are usually divided into "topics", which really are just sections divided with level-2 headings (== Heading ==). For that reason I recommend, before writing anything, to click on "Add topic" at the top. I edited this page's code manually to give this discussion a topic title. It is also best to sign talk page edits with --Fredg999 (talk) 21:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC) (you'll see the result at the end of my reply). And when replying, use one or more colons (:) at the beginning of each paragraph (one for level-1 reply, two for level-2 reply, etc.). One more thing, notice that two line breaks are necessary to break paragraphs.

In general, you can look at existing pages and try to copy the style, although there are still many pages which require cleanup, so maybe take example on pages that have been worked on more thoroughly (e.g. common topics and/or pages with many edits from multiple users). Maybe ironically, 12edo is probably a good page to take as an example.

Looking forward to see your contributions! --Fredg999 (talk) 21:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)