Re: thoughts

[Rick Hansen (aka RickH)]

Orm Finnendahl wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>  I just wanted to add to my recent comments. It might seem that my
> posts are unadequately critical. Although they are fueled by my
> frustration using the program I want to make clear that I really
> appreciate the tremendous and excellent work which has been done so
> far by the developers! Part of the frustration is due to my incomplete
> knowledge of the program and another part is due to the fact that
> music engraving is such an incredibly complex thing.
> 
> I still haven't come to terms with suggestions how to improve the
> situation. Lilypond's baroque syntax seems to indicate to me the still
> unresolved issue of the "proper" mix of generalization and individual
> requirements and the definition of semantic and syntactic markup when
> it comes to notation (all other notation programs have the same
> problems -wrapped up in some sort of gui to make it less obvious-
> which shows that it is a non-trivial issue).
> 
> As it is somewhat crucial for my own work to be able to have some
> definition of the music which survives the next few generations of
> hard- and software development (and don't break like many of the
> scores at mutopia) I will for sure keep thinking about it. Especially
> as I tend to think that lilyponds syntax could get more consistent
> which eventually would result in the dilemma of a redefinition
> breaking even more old sources.
> 
> Anyway: Apolgies for unfair criticism and hopefully I will be able to
> be more constructive in the future. The more I learn about the inner
> workings of lilypond, the clearer I might get.
> 
> Until then keep up the good work and don't get mad at me when I get
> mad at the program ;-)
> 
> --
> Orm
> 
> P.S.: Maybe one thing: Apart from suggesting to rewrite lilyponds
> parser from scratch it would be a tremendous thing if lilypond could
> get rid of some TeX related restrictions, especially the limitation to
> alphabetic characters in definitions. It would make things so much
> easier being able to use underscores and numbers in definitions! Is it
> really that hard to do (is lilypond really still using the TeX parser
> and does that actually mean you have to write the parser from
> scratch)?
> 
> 
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> 
> 


No problem, frustration is often part of the learning process, we've all
been there.  What makes lilypond so great is often the thing that make it
hard.  Namely it is a highly granular language, without a lot of high-level
methods.  This makes it very powerful in terms of getting the output you
want, but adds to complexity.  This aspect should not change IMO, it is kind
of like the "assembler language" of music, as an analogy.

But, assembler language programmers soon learn the value of a good macro
pre-processor to encapsulate multi stepped tasks to single step
parameterized tasks.  Having that, they can make assembler into a high level
language themselves.  I am beginning to see how the use of a 3rd party
source pre-processor (like GEMA with Lua integration) can bring a high-level
language "feel" to lilypond and still leave you with the option of using
native lp coding, in all it's granular glory.

So really the continuum is not granular-to-GUI, it's granular to high level
language to GUI.  There is another alternative between native lp and GUI,
(it just doesn't come shipped with lp).  I'm not going to ask the devs for a
source pre-processor, but there is nothing stopping people from using
GEMA/Lua, or m4, or ML1, etc. and sharing useful macros.  Check out GEMA/Lua
together they provide a java/vb like full language, along with a powerful
source regular expression parser.




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