Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> writes: > On 05/06/12 06:10, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote: >> As long as you seek out new technologies, you'll always get new >> perspectives on programming. >> >> I, like most people, have only a limited amount of time. Learning a >> programming language well enough to write code that sticks to wall >> when you throw it, is a significant investment, and if there is a >> choice, I'd invest in something that will pay off beyond working on >> LilyPond. Scheme has very use in any context, so it's not very >> attractive. > > The problem with Scheme is that while it's theoretically beautiful its > paradigm and syntax are quite different from most current mainstream > programming languages. That makes it a much harder language to ease > into than most out there, and consequently harder to play around the > edges of contributing or tweaking LilyPond. > > Some while back I remember playing around with a snippet containing a > scheme function for controlling the rules of transposition. Even > though I was only tweaking someone else's code it was very finnicky > and difficult to get right.
I would doubt that this would have been the fault of Scheme. More likely a problem of the Scheme/LilyPond interface choices, but those choices don't go away when replacing Scheme. > That almost certainly wouldn't have been the case if I'd been tweaking > Java, Ruby or Python (all of which are programming languages I don't > really _know_, but which are not difficult to ease into or to > comprehend). Python is a programming language where simple cut&paste of example code fails unless you cut and paste whole lines since leading whitespace matters. I don't call that exactly easy to comprehend. Anyway, show the code. Take a snippet of LilyPond code, pretend that LilyPond's extension language is Python, and show how it should look like under that pretense. > Regarding new languages, while I don't want to re-open the "alphabet > soup" discussion, my suggestion wasn't simply a casual shout-out to a > cool new language; it was a carefully-considered proposal based on > concerns for programming power, ease and flexibility of syntax, code > efficiency and suitability for the next generation of hardware. Fewer buzzphrases, more substance. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
