Re: Free online courses

[David Kastrup]

Federico Bruni <address@hidden> writes:

> Il 01/10/2012 02:37, David B. Stocker ha scritto:
>> I'm currently taking the course "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"
>> which demonstrates programming fundamentals using Python.
>>
>> I'm a veteran LilyPond user, with absolutely no programming experience.
>> It occurs to me that this may be a way for people who may want to
>> contribute to LilyPond but who are not programmers by day to perhaps get
>> their feet wet.
>>
>> https://www.coursera.org/category/cs-programming
>
> Hi David
>
> thanks for sharing this link!
> I've just signed to the course, I want to give python another try :)
>
> Recently I found out also these free courses:
> http://www.codecademy.com/learn

To put a bit of perspective on it: with regard to LilyPond itself,
Python will not give you all that much leverage on its own.  However,
the "supporting" environment like lilypond-book, Patchy, musicxml2ly,
convert-ly, and a few other things are all written in Python, and to a
good degree at a perfectly accessible level.

_User_ level programming in LilyPond itself can make best use of
"functional language" skills (Scheme, Lisp).  I think that our
"extending LilyPond guide" gives at least a brief primer.  For _core_
programming of LilyPond, nominally you can make use of C++, Scheme, C
and low-level programming skills.  The system "architecture" however is
contorted enough that the skills set for core programming are probably
better characterized as "hacking" than "programming", and getting away
from that state is making only slow progress.  If there was an
equivalent in natural language, it would probably be "it is not as much
important which language you can speak already as long as you enjoy word
games".

Of course, speaking no language at all makes it somewhat hard to enjoy
word games, and Python may be a good start.

-- 
David Kastrup