Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[David Rogers]

Tim McNamara <address@hidden> 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