Re: Proposed manual change

[Carl Sorensen]

On 12/18/09 4:53 AM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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?

I think it starts out as a non-random collection of tricks.  And maybe it
eventually morphs into a real reference, showing an example of using every
one of the functions that shows up in the appendix.  Hmm -- I like that
idea, but I'm not sure I'm up for it in the short term.  That's a *lot* of
work.  But let me start with the collection, and see what happens from
there.

> 
>> 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.

What I have in mind is identifying some typical patterns or needs that are
found, and collecting programming snippets that match those needs.  I
haven't done it yet, so I don't really know what those categories are.  But
I'll get there.

> 
>> 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.

OK, I'm fine with that.  And I think that it's not a problem to duplicate
some material in the two different manuals.  After all, we have some
duplication between Learning and Notation (note that I used the words, not
the abbreviations :)).

> 
> 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.

Hooray!  I'm El Guy, the man of La Manual.

I'm going to put the simple substitution functions in Notation, along with
an advert for Extending.  And I'll also put simple substitution functions in
Extending, along with the more complicated functions.

Thanks,

Carl