Janek Warchoł <janek.lilyp...@gmail.com> writes: > According to our motto the aim of LilyPond is "music engraving to > everyone" - i'd say it's a very good goal. It would mean that a > person with average computer skills (like navigating a web browser and > using word processor) should be able to create very good engravings of > not-so-complicated music (e.g. Mozart's "Ave Verum"). I think we're > quite far from this goal; conductor of our choir didn't manage to > switch to LilyPond.
So he did not manage to spell music in LilyPond in a few days. I am sure he tried to spell words in English for longer than that before he gave up. "Navigating a web browser" are not "average computer skills". Those are not computer skills at all. You need more computer skills to program a video recorder. LilyPond is a batch processing system. It is not an interactive program. You need to spell out the tasks. People for which working with a command line is an unsurmountable challenge won't work with LilyPond. They might get along with some GUI thingy that drives LilyPond as its backend. The one thing where LilyPond needs to refocus is getting away more from the "fiddle around" stuff where you poke a program with a stick for getting results rather than specifying your task. But specifying your task in a computer-comprehensible way is not avoidable. In the areas of TeX/LaTeX and Emacs programming, I have hit a few surprise candidates without programming background who put together a significant body of macros and functions for their own work. Pretty much always it turned out that they were specialists in Oriental or antique languages. LilyPond is similar. We can hope to get into a direction where it requires less fiddling and programming skills, but writing things directly in a computer language will always require logic, language and thinking skills. FORTRAN is a computer language in which good mathematicians can write efficient numerical algorithms without tremendous programming skills. As a result, there is a large corpus of numeric programming libraries in FORTRAN. It's not all that nice of a programming language, but it does not add much of a distraction for a mathematician writing down numeric code and/or using that of others. If LilyPond manages a state where it does not get in the way of composers writing down music, that is about the best one can hope to achieve. The tools and workflow can be made smoother, but that's it. Don't _ever_ try to sell LilyPond to somebody who is not warm enough with a computer to have a preferred editor. In that case, you should rather sell something like Frescobaldi. Something which the user can actually touch and see. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
