Tim McNamara <tim...@bitstream.net> writes: > FWIW with today's exchange rate for Americans, the €15 I sent = US > $19.37 (minus fees). I don't know what the going hourly rate for > developers is where David lives;
If you pay by the hour, ridiculous (sth like €120 is not rare), but there are jobs paid by the "guessed number of hours", and you know how accurately programmers guess. The last job I had paid about three times what I want to _arrive_ at in some distant future, at 30hr/week. > at US average wages for programmers my $19.37 would at best pay for > about 30 minutes of his time. I can afford to send about that every > month. What David *could* be making working at a job underscores the > need for many Lilypond users to be contributing- he would need 320 > people a month each contributing €15 to be competitive with having a > regular full time job (and he still would not be getting many of the > benefits that would come with traditional employment- at least seen > through the lens of how self-employment works in America). There is no real competition involved: I am living at home, can go outside and talk to horses whenever I need to think, lose no time commuting, am available at short notice when my girlfriend needs a hand. I certainly don't end up with less than 40hr of "work" any week, but much of the work involves brooding. I never really get into hassles with customers (only everybody I am communicating with), and "sure, this code is a piece of crap, but leave it alone and/or patch another layer of ugliness on top" does not occur. If I want to fix things, I am allowed to do it. This job is a good fit for me, and that's why I want to keep it. So the point of comparison for me is not what I might be able to make elsewhere, but what I need for staying on board. It may sound impressive to talk about sacrifice and whatever, but in truth I have autistic traits and am a pennypincher. There are not many expenses I actually derive significant enjoyment from. No family to support, no kids. No moral qualms around closed software. So in the currency of deriving satisfaction from life, this is a better deal for me than it would be for a lot of others. The only problem is to keep it sustainable. > As great as Lilypond's output is, there is a long way to go in terms > of simplification and usability (the syntax needs to be simplified > dramatically; a lot of the code users have to write is pretty ugly and > is going to scare off potential users). Having someone working full > time on Lilypond is a great way to get that done in under a decade. The syntax will _not_ be simplified dramatically since LilyPond, overall, has a reasonably simple syntax. And dramatic simplifications are nothing I can sneak in sideways anyway: that is GLISS material. One obvious simplification for an accordion player like me would be to unite chord and note mode (currently tremolo notation interferes) since the common accompaniment patterns are something like c c': g c': (can you guess what I mean here?). It would be nice to have fewer incompatible modes, and simpler ways of extending them. And "the C++ must go" with regard to how LilyPond can be extended. If parts of LilyPond require "object orientation", then the respective tools need to be available from Scheme. No user can be expected to recompile. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
