Re: Scheme syntax vs. other languages [was: Re: Appreciation / Financial support]

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, it's that unfamiliarity that I'm talking about, really.  My
> point isn't that Scheme is bad in itself but that using it means that
> virtually _everyone_ wanting to script or work on LilyPond has to
> learn a new language, syntax and set of programming paradigms, even if
> they are already programmers; because apart from computer science
> students, most people don't learn LISP dialects.
>
> This isn't a bad thing to have to do in terms of one's programming
> experience and education but it _is_ a potential barrier to entry for
> LilyPond, which I think might be avoidable.

I think that a larger barrier is actually the use of features like
modules in a non-documented and non-obvious way.

That's not the fault of Scheme or Guile per se.  It is still definitely
a barrier since you can read up all the Guile/Scheme documentation you
want to without getting much wiser about how these things interact with
LilyPond.

There is a _lot_ of barriers involved, and quite a few that suck
royally.  But changing language would, in my opinion, do rather little
to address that.

One thing that's on my black list of uglinesses is the markup system
together with the markup macro.  This is non-robust, and interacts with
the module system and interpretation timing in non-trivial ways.

It's one of those things that you can do in Scheme quite better (or at
all) than in many other languages, but where resisting the temptation
would have paid off.

-- 
David Kastrup