Re: Proposed manual change

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 08:07:08PM -0700, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> 
> On 12/17/09 5:55 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > My first thought is that I wish we had somebody dedicated to
> > working on the scheme stuff; I'd love to leave this up to a
> > trusted person and thereafter ignore the debate.  But since that's
> > probably not happening within the next 6 months, I guess I'd
> > better plunge in.
> 
> Actually, I think that my next project is to put a little bit of work into
> Extending LilyPond (EL).

Ok, I hereby dub you El Guy.

(that said, it would be nice if we started using the one-word
manual names as in the website; that way there'll be absolutely no
problems with people not understanding what we're talking about)

> I think I know what EL should be.  There should be a tutorial similar to the
> LM, that teaches how to get started in LilyPond advanced programming, how to
...
> The rest of the EL is a collection of tips and tricks, or samples of useful
> code.

That's fine.

> Think LSR or NR for programming.

Those are quite different.  Is it a reference, or a random
collection of tricks?

> It's probably more like the LSR
> than the NR, because I can't imagine we'd ever be able to create an
> exhaustive list of what can be done in Scheme, but I'm picturing sections
> for a certain type of work (probably with some snippets from the LSR used to
> explain them).

I'm liking this part less.  Is this be duplicating stuff in the
LSR?  Would this collection work better directly on the LSR?

probably not to the latter point; we don't seem to get enough
users contributing to it to be worth the pain.

> Have you looked at the patch?  I think that what I've written can go in the
> NR right where I put it.

I still think that if Extending is supposed to start off in a
gradual "Learning-style" manual, jumping over simple subsitution
function sis a bad idea.  I don't like having Extending "depend"
on material in Notation.

My preference would be for Notation to have an advert pointing at
Extending... something like Learning 4.6.6, where they show a
rainbow-note example, then say "go loko at Tweaking with scheme".

That said, the final decision rests with you, El Guy.


(argh, what a painful FAIL with the rainbow example.  All those
colors are defined, but they didn't use all notes in the scale in
the output.)

Cheers,
- Graham