[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Is Scheme really preventing users from hacking LilyPond's internals?
I sure believe it does. Scheme is ok, but too remote to many people's
culture. My perception has always been that the first few hurdles
Scheme doesn't really help, but I doubt whether this is the real reason.
For example, Darcs (a distributed Version control system) is written in
Haskell, a language which is arguably just as or more obscure than
Scheme. In its short life (approx. 2.5 years), it has attracted a number
of contributors, to the point that 50 % of the code (IIRC) is now coming
from the other people than the project leader.
I think that Scheme is the smallest problem in getting more LilyPond
contributors.
Larger problems are:
* a user base largely consisting of musicians (ie. non-hackers)
* music typesetting, which is as much of a esoteric niche problem as
you can get.
* An architecture that only has started stabilizing only now (I'm
finally satisfied with the architecture of the Grob engine now, I think)
I don't even try to suggest that Python (or Perl, or whatever...)
is better in abstract or purely scientific terms. As a matter
of fact, I'm no big Python fan myself. However, evidence seems
to show that extensible systems based on Python, Lua, or Tcl are more
Examples? In most extensible "user" applications, there is a big
barrier to extending the application, because the learning curve is
steep, and knowledge of the user-interface of an app doesn't necessarily
help with programming it.
Case in point: as a die-hard Emacs user, I still don't know how to write
Elisp.
--
Han-Wen Nienhuys - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen
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