Re: GOP2-5 - GLISS discussions

[Marc Hohl]

Am 14.09.2012 20:48, schrieb Graham Percival:
> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:39:53AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > > PS: I'm still not happy with a separate mailing list.
> > A separate fluffy mailing list not to be taken seriously where people
> > may decide that no further changes to syntax will be allowed.
> That list will be deciding nothing.
The whole discussion reminds me of the way songs are written in the
music band I play – David, do you remind the story? I think I told it
even before Graham arrived, so it was just you, Janek, and my wife
at Waltrop listening to my clumsy English ...

I play guitar in a band where a jazz pianist by heart (or shoul I call him
fanatic?) plays along with a female singer who *loves* pop and
*hates* jazz. So when she comes up with a new song idea, the pianist says:
'well, that's great, let's do some modulation here and some dom7#11 there,
oh, and the second verse should be minor third higher' and stuff like that.

The female singer then gets very upset, crying out loud that she'll
hurt the pianist seriously if he just does not stop ruining her song idea
immediately.

I found out that at least 50% of the harmonics and ideas are to be
reverted by the pianist himself in less than ten minutes because
he realises that he has overdone it *without* threatening him with
violence.
So the easiest way is to stay calm for about 10 minutes, and the
song will be nearly perfect. Our singer just had not realized how simple
life can be ;-)

I think that the GLISS list fulfills a similar task. Ideas are
exchanged, and I bet that for every overboarding idea
someone else on the list is giving a counterexample,
so in the end a small amount of (perhaps) useful inspirations
is boiled down to a basic concept which can be
seriously treated on -devel.
So let the people bring in the unrealistic ideas and proposals!
I think it will take longer than ten minutes, but most of the ideas
that will lead to a conplete rewrite of the parser will vanish very
quickly (similar to a lot of dom7#11 chords in our songs ;-)

> [...]
> David, after Waltrop I was really enthusiastic about lilypond.  I
> saw the problems that Rudolfo had in trying to make a simple
> change to the website, and I was really fired up to fix the
> problems in the CG.  I was also fired up to organize weekly
> discussions on irc and/or voice.  However, your insulting tone in
> the GLISS emails has completely negated that enthusiasm.
Yes. Waltrop was a very special experience (I think for all
of the participants) and the mail exchange about GLISS is
quite the opposite to that.

Don't get me wrong; I think I can understand your reaction.
You are probably the only one who can cope with the parser
stuff, so with every idea showing up, you probably weigh this
in relation to the parser work you had done or are about to do,
and most of the "proposals" (what they aren't really) go in
the wrong direction.
But as I tried to explain above: most of this stuff from
non-parser-experts will be blown by other non-parser-experts ...

By the way: I like the idea of simplifying the
\override \set \tweak stuff, that's something that would really be
helpful for users; ideally in combination with a more
verbose explanation from Lilypond why
\override BarLine #'foo will not change anything in the output.
Generally, I don't think there will be massive changes to the syntax
(but maybe I am proven wrong): a lot of quite long and/or complex
pieces are typeset by lilypond, so the ly language is not the worst
option.


Just my 2 ct

Marc