Jesús Guillermo Andrade <gandr...@usermail.com> writes: > El 12/11/2009, a las 04:11 a.m., David Kastrup escribió: > > Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke-l...@xs4all.nl> writes: > > > As a new contributor/developer, by using a different, and a particular > > unfriendly platform for free software development, you are faced with > > tackling several difficult problems at once. > > access to the Elisp data structures. _If_ Emacs has the principal > capabilities for some task, you can code the whole task in Elisp. > This does not appear to be doable with Lilypond's Scheme. At > least not to the degree where it is the preferred way of thinking > about new tasks. > > Lilypond's Scheme is GUILE's Scheme. And the fact you are pointing out > is repeatedly found on hundreds of blogs around the internet , > whenever some Java/ C/C++ programmer is faced with Scheme/Lisp. They > all have said the same thing: How come we have to use such and old > language, when we have such great new (and modern!) new ones that > could handle everything easily?
Huh? Did you understand at all what I have been trying to say? My complaint is not that I have to use Scheme. Quite contrary. My complaint is that using Scheme is not sufficient and I have to use C++ as well. And that's a nuisance. > Fashionability is the keyword here. No. Limiting the required knowledge to actually do something is the keyword. > For a start from scratch, Lua would be a nice choice: > message-passing coroutines (very nice for translators keeping > context!), procedural syntax, very portable, fast. And you can > learn everything worth knowing about it in few days. > > Why not Java? or Objective C for that matter? Because the syntax diagram for Lua fits on one half-letter page. Because it has a single data structure (the table). Because in two days you have learnt all that is relevant to learn about Lua, and can turn to learning about Lilypond. > ... Or Ada, or COBOL, or ALGOL or Fortran, or > ... hmmm... gosh... there are so many. In the beggining (1958) there > were only 2. And currently just Lisp stays strong and way ahead of all > others in terms of flexibility, scalabilty and freedom to do whatever > anybody might want. Not really. Emacs Lisp is a fossilized half-lexical abomination. But it does the job. And most Lisp is designed as functional, and programmed as procedural, with the fundamental data structure, the list, being basically non-scope-local. And that's the main point: does the job. The one thing Emacs Lisp has going over Common Lisp that it is a reasonably limited language to learn in comparison. Which is a nuisance to seasoned Lisp programmers, and gets quite more people to meddle with it. > I can actually understand and work with the Lua coroutines. In > contrast, I am not sure that trying to solve tasks with Scheme... > > > That is a problem of perspective that is faced with all programmers > that have ever read one line of scheme/lisp code. The problem has > historical roots and has been documented elsewere. Notwithstanding, > there are several ways to overcome this perpective limitation. Oh come on, get down from your high horse. I am maintaining Emacs Lisp packages and have written a few. I am familiar with the proceduralisms of applied Lisp, but it does not mean I can't write something in a functional style like ((lambda (f n) (f f n)) (lambda (f n) (if (> n 1) (* n (f f (- n 1))) 1)) 5) > Scheme might not be the nicest language for programming, but being > able to solve everything important in some application in _one_ > language without need of recompiling (or heap management) or > language interfacing would be a good step towards recruiting new > programmers and solving tasks, partly in form of libraries or > packages which can be just used on-demand rather than needing to > be compiled in. > > Where can I vote? In the usual way, with patches on the list. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
