> but honestly this bit describes every piece of sufficiently complex software I've worked on.
Just to be clear: the word "atop" is being used literally here in a way that doesn't hold for text-based languages.
Your frustration: "What does z() do, and why is it calling flarg() twice?"
My frustration v0.1: "What does z() do, and why is it calling flarg() twice?"
clicks and drags an object to reveal another Fresco
My frustration v0.2: "What does z() do, why is it calling flarg() twice, and why are there 7 instances of flarg pasted atop one another with internal non-local connections which trigger stack-overflow protection every time z gets called? Also, why is there a zero-width spacer between the 'z' and the '()' which, while somehow syntactically correct, causes 'z' not to get called? Also, why does the text editor require one to click and drag a line from 'z' to the '()' in order to get rid of the zero-width spacer in order to actually call the function?"
Edit: I'm sure you can find similar weirdness in a text-based language. Perhaps if one made a contract that they're going to use a global setter variable in every function of a Javascript program which will mutate some global state. That would be bad. But you really have to work to do that whereas the natural tendency in Max is to wrap an object-chain back atop itself to create unreadable spaghetti as one builds a prototype.
Just to be clear: the word "atop" is being used literally here in a way that doesn't hold for text-based languages.
Your frustration: "What does z() do, and why is it calling flarg() twice?"
My frustration v0.1: "What does z() do, and why is it calling flarg() twice?"
clicks and drags an object to reveal another Fresco
My frustration v0.2: "What does z() do, why is it calling flarg() twice, and why are there 7 instances of flarg pasted atop one another with internal non-local connections which trigger stack-overflow protection every time z gets called? Also, why is there a zero-width spacer between the 'z' and the '()' which, while somehow syntactically correct, causes 'z' not to get called? Also, why does the text editor require one to click and drag a line from 'z' to the '()' in order to get rid of the zero-width spacer in order to actually call the function?"
Edit: I'm sure you can find similar weirdness in a text-based language. Perhaps if one made a contract that they're going to use a global setter variable in every function of a Javascript program which will mutate some global state. That would be bad. But you really have to work to do that whereas the natural tendency in Max is to wrap an object-chain back atop itself to create unreadable spaghetti as one builds a prototype.