On 2019-03-27 4:19 pm, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
That’s great… But essentially all of the documentation has \relative at the top-level. So what is a newbie to think, other than "My code should look like\paper { … } \header {…} \relative c' { … } But then they start to cut and paste code bits, or switch the order of voices, or any of a dozen other natural and intuitive operations that don’t imply ‘I’m destructive!!’… and then wonder why their music goes off the deep end.
Truly it is not "destructive", to be fair. It at best is "chaotic", where there is a perfectly deterministic behavior behind the scenes that simply is not obvious at first glance.
And, that's a fault of the documentation but also the end user. As with most things with computers, it is ultimately the responsibility* of the user to be willing to understand how a system works. \relative is documented clearly enough that anyone who asks "Why is my music switching octaves?" is not honoring their side of the contract. The notes shift because \relative depends on context; and cutting-and-pasting is going to change that context.
That said, I fully agree with advising folks who intend on moving music around more fluidly to avoid \relative since it adds a maintenance chore that would otherwise impede the creative process. And there does seem to be an over-reliance on \relative in the documentation, to the extent that folks are certainly biased to use it.
Largely, I adopted \relative simply because pitches on the treble staff would otherwise require at least one apostrophe. I have considered dropping \relative in my own works, replacing it with something like "\transpose c c'" so that I can at least minimize the use of octave punctuation. So while I can definitely see the advantage of being more explicit with octaves, I desire more to avoid excessive redundancy.
(* Side rant: One of the worst offences the computer industry committed was convincing people that computers were better than humans. Over the decades, users have been trained to accept the computer "knows best" and not to employ their own reasoning. Much (proprietary) software out there relegates users to be slaves to the machine--George Jetson pushing his button. In an ideal world, the computer is a tool to help us do our jobs more effectively; but that necessitates that we are the master. But with that role comes responsibility to understand how things work. Granted, not all of us have the time to devote to the idiosyncrasies and minutia of managing individual computers much less a large network, which is why good IT will still be critical to success. But the end user must be encouraged and empowered to own their device. At the end of the day, the computer must work for the person; not the other way around.)
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