Henning Hraban Ramm <hra...@fiee.net> writes: > Please. Stop. > > This discussion is going nowhere. > And David can use his badly-paid time better for enhancing LilyPond > than for discussing ideal worlds that never will happen.
Actually, I am not as much discussing ideal worlds rather than the misconception that switching languages is all that it takes to arrive at them. Instead, we need a good system architecture. If you take a look at "real" architecture, it is obvious that you can't build skyscrapers like sandcastles. If you talk with hut builders, you'll find that straw and loam make for much better building material than sand. And yet you'll find a conspicuous absence of straw in skyscrapers, while sizeable amounts of sand can be found in their concrete. The architecture of LilyPond needs work to become more user-accessible. No question about that. But switching languages will not do wonders for that. Like sand, I consider Scheme as "solid enough" and "flexible enough" when used right. > Whoever believes to know better than our currently most active > programmer should come up with some useful code. If I were to rewrite LilyPond from scratch, I don't know what I would pick. Scheme and in particular Guile have advantages and disadvantages. I am currently looking at Goops, an object-oriented layer on top of Scheme. It introduces a different style of data structures and thinking about them, but yet is very much in the Scheme spirit. One of the problem of Scheme (and also Goops) is that it offers a lot of raw power, but that there is not really much like a "standard coding style" when going to more complex tasks. And "you can invent anything you like" is much more strenuous for people than "you have established idioms for about anything you like". I am still working on figuring out a lot of "how do you do X if you are a genius" questions since answering them is a prerequisite to creating answers to the question "how can you hope to do X if you are not a genius". There are pieces written not for, but against the violin. I admire the Bach violin partitas and sonatas because they are the opposite: they are really hard stuff, but the toughness is not self-serving. You have large passages where it is not necessary to insert any fingering instructions, because there is just one fingering that actually makes sense. I have little doubt that Bach would have been a good programmer. The stuff he wrote makes sense, and actually a lot of it still makes sense when played on a different instrument. It's astonishing how well some of the violin solo pieces transfer to lute or guitar. In some manner, the discussion about the optimal programming language is comparable to a discussion about the optimal music instrument. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
