Welcome to ChucK!!
We tend to do our best work when we follow our true interests. ChucK was created because we genuinely love both music and programming—and for anyone who wants to make music with computers (or learn to do so). As the creator and chief designer of ChucK, I earnestly believe that programming is (or should be) a creative endeavor in and of itself. It should be fun, expressive, rewarding. And to create music through programming, well, that is doubly awesome.
I started working on ChucK in 2002, having started in the Computer Science PhD. program at Princeton University a year earlier. If rock music was my gateway-drug into music-making (and my undergrad alma mater Duke University my passage to programming) then Princeton was where I started putting these elements together. Although I couldn’t quite articulate it at the time, I was drawn to the elegance of certain features in programming languages, and aspired to create things, programmable software things, that empower people to make music, but in a way that was aesthetically nuanced and fun. I wanted to rock, and help others rock—with the computer.