Data flow programming can be quite hard to wrap your head around, even for experienced developers in traditional programming languages. And, let's face it, a lot of the patches and abstractions look like a mess.

What are your inspirations when it comes to programming in Pure Data?

Another question that is somewhat close is: what do you consider to be Pure Data's best practices, tips and tricks, design patterns?

@lzr Personally I find dataflow programming the easiest, and Pd in particular the absolute easiest. When I first discovered it (embarrassingly late in it's life and mine) I was astounded by how easy it is! But I am an English speaker, which helps. Type a word in a box and it does something...... wow! I couldn't put it down.
If you want a slick looking program....... no, Katja's SliceJockey is as good as it gets........
http://www.katjaas.nl/slicejockey/slicejockey.html
If you want a DAW...... no, do it (again if you want?) in an assembly language.

But if you want to do data-flow.... if this happens do that yes/no?........ systems engineering.... turn my lights off (if they are on) when I turn on the TV, and by the way stop streaming the audio and change the EQ, but only if the sample rate is correct and the value of PI is known to enough decimal places..............etc.

Best practices...........

1. Play around a bit so you have the bug and start to understand the format......... but not too long.
2. Understand that in two or three days you will already be patching easily like a pro.......if.......
3. you read this..........http://puredata.info/docs/manuals/pd/x2.htm but stop when you see the words "2.9 Data Structures" or you will abandon Pd before you should. Do come back to it later though!
4. Play around with abstractions, gops and variables ($n and $0) until you understand them fully.... the Floss manuals are useful......http://en.flossmanuals.net/pure-data/index/ and this Forum........... http://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/category/1/technical-issues
5. Try to learn to suffer from OCD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive–compulsive_disorder in only small doses. Keeping your patch obsessively tidy will always pay off. That is the good side of OCD. Abandon your work and sleep on the problems from time to time (even if you must get up in the night to change something)......... you will be more productive in other areas of your life as well......

David.

As for my personnal experience I started programming with Pd and it help me to get a grasp of what programmation can help me achieve and more importantly it got me excited about it ! because it was easy to achieve some results quite early with the help of the awesome community.

Now I use pd mainly as an audio lib, I developp patches in pd and use them in third party code using libpd : https://github.com/libpd/libpd

Data-flow is truly awesome when it comes to audio it enables you to prototype really easily. Pd is truly cross-platform, is one of the most complete and easy to use audio lib you could find. It is really worth it ! If you are already an experienced programmer I would go the libpd way.

As David says Katja does amazing work, her website is a real reference for me. I would also mention Andy Farnell's work with this reference book which uses pd for all the code examples : https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/designing-sound (which are available free for download). Unfortunately http://obiwannabe.co.uk/ is down but you would find a ton of tutorials from the book.

As for abstraction libs that are well coded and documented from which you can get good design patterns :

• rjdj is full vanilla meaning it can be used with libpd without having to compile specific objects : https://github.com/rjdj/rjlib
• mmb , not sure it is full vanilla though : https://github.com/dotmmb/mmb
• diy2 , not completly vanilla but great : http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/patches/patch/76

There are probably a lot of other good libraries too.

As for best practices they are the same as other programming languages keep your abstractions short and modular, write comments etc.
For pd specifics, you could try not to cross too much cables, and you probably want to try to keep your data going from top to bottom as much as you can and make it clear if you don't.