Continuing the discussion from Tau Suggestions:
I’m interested to know in what contexts, and how, folks use Sonic Pi’s loop function - would love to get feedback or hear people’s thoughts.
@cazarim re your comment in the other topic about it being “one of the first things we learn at Sonic Pi to structure repetition”: from thinking about it, what strikes me about the loop function is its necessity to be wrapped in a thread to be useful in all but the most trivial Sonic Pi scripts. This is certainly not wrong - but to my mind, it adds a layer of potentially unnecessary cognitive load to the newcomer.
One could make the case for example that rather than focussing on a ‘standard’ loop first in tutorials or documentation, it’s more useful to introduce the more Sonic Pi idiomatic ‘live_loop’ first, and then only mention the ‘standard’ loop as a tangential topic for the curious - that way, it doesn’t require potentially unlearning the slightly more complex ‘thread plus loop’
Cazarim (and others) - do you think if live_loop is framed correctly, the above would work?
The way I teach workshops in schools and the advice I give to teachers is that in Sonic Pi loops are called live_loops.
('m aware that the tutorial introduces loops first before live_loops - but that was because it was written before I designed and implemented live_loops.)
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Since part of my interest in this was to evaluate the handling of loop in future updates or inclusions in the documentation of Sonic Pi or its newer versions/successors, given Sam’s comment at Tau Suggestions - #43 by samaaron that particular discussion is potentially no longer important - unless a refresh of Sonic Pi’s documentation is ever considered. 
A refresh of Sonic Pi’s documentation is LONG overdue!
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Hi, Ethan!
I answered to Sam in my other comment (Tau Suggestions - #48 by cazarim ).
But, to sum up the question, I don’t think it’s an extra work to non-English speakers. On the contrary: less words and special characters is less work to us. It’s nice to read what Sam wrote here because it puts things on historical perspective too (loop came first as a function, then live_loop etc.). Maybe we should think (as I suggested in my reply) of loop as an alias of live_loop, because it really is nicer to type on mobiles and tablets (which will surely be used to live code).