Re: Several questions concerning scheme-music-function

[David Kastrup]

Robert Schmaus <address@hidden> writes:

> Thanks Aaron,
>
> it's rather on-topic I guess. Or rather: I'm afraid.
>
> In your first link, there's a sample chapter of "The Little Schemer"
> available. You'd think that they would put something up that's
> acutally helpful at getting the idea of Scheme and/or that book. And
> maybe that even was their intention! But ... can you make any sense of
> this?
>
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/sample.pdf
>
> I certainly can't.

That doesn't make a statement about Scheme, just like dadaism does not
make a statement about mathematical logic.

> I guess my problem is: Scheme seems to be a very nice intellectual
> exercise. I'm sure it's very elegant and - ultimately - very powerful
> (as I can see in the snippet repository)

That's not really related.  Scheme is more a way of expressing things
than a way of doing things: the actual work (which would be described as
"powerful") is the business of the application-specific primitives.

Powerful snippets just mean that extensive functionality has been made
accessible via Scheme.  Scheme brings comparatively little baggage of
its own (well, concerning early iterations of the language) so it ties
reasonably nicely into larger systems.

> but it's also very unlike everything that's used normally. But Scheme
> is near impossible to read and therefore also to write.

Well, there are writing conventions that make it reasonably easy to read
(Python goes one step further by making the writing conventions in the
form of indentations actually relevant to the meaning).  One impediment
to reading functional programming languages in the Lisp family that they
don't actually have a human-readable input syntax.  Instead they employ
a transliteration of the parse tree as a list structure.

That makes it very easy to programmatically process expressions and
write structure-preserving macros and transformations.

But it does require reading expressions _not_ designed to be punctuated
with symbols occuring in variety and frequencies very vaguely resembling
natural language.

> Now, I can live with that - most of the times I don't have to
> customise anything anyway. It's just, that with Scheme, I know, I'll
> never get into it, too.

Do you have that attitude towards playing an instrument as well?

> Ok, thanks again for the references. I think for now, I simply stay
> within the "out of the box" Lilypond limits. I'd have to invest hours
> of learning Scheme - that's not an option for the near future, I'm
> afraid.

It's usually a distributed investment.  You get some things done, then
some more things.  Scheme is not as far away in LilyPond as, say, Lua is
in LuaTeX.  It's much more integrated so it doesn't take a leap into a
distant world.

-- 
David Kastrup