Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> 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