Tim McNamara <tim...@bitstream.net> writes:
Why is it like this? Because the focus of Lilypond has been, to
a great degree, to create something that enables users to
produce beautiful sheet music. That is the raison d'être of
Lilypond. The main focus has not been on user friendliness and
easy useability. As a result, a total of zero of the dozen or
so musicians/composers I have tried to turn on to Lilypond have
taken it up. They downloaded it, saw it is impossibly
difficult, and went to something else. BTW, most of these are
people with doctorates, medical degrees, MBAs, etc. They are
computer savvy and they are not dumb. The user interface (like
it or not, the *syntax* is the user interface- the text editor
chosen by the user is not the user interface for Lilypond) is
too beginner-unfriendly.
Now, maybe that's OK- it may not be necessary to reach millions
of users; maybe it's OK to focus on the users who will persevere
through the steep learning curve and obscure commands and
sometimes difficult syntax. Maybe it's OK to focus first and
foremost on great output. But it might be OK to focus on making
Lilypond easier to learn and use for non-programmers. Indeed, I
think that this is part of what David is talking about working
towards.
That's the impression I get as well.
I think a part of the difficulty is that in this situation it is
absolutely necessary for those creating the core code of Lilypond
to "program it backwards" - to write their code according to what
users want to *type*, and _not_ according to the end result that
those users want to *accomplish*. Coding according to what your
users want to type must be a ridiculously inefficient and
irritating way for a programmer to have to work. It's
unfortunately also the only way Lilypond can suffice for more than
a few people.
David Kastrup gave a good example of this earlier, showing how the
midi block has been changed over time. To a programmer, the
current easy-to-use Lilypond syntax for obtaining midi output is
(apparently) an illogical kludge. Needless to say, it doesn't look
that way to a non-programmer.
--
David R
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