Re: Coding practices

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:44 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> After reading over David's most recent e-mails to the list, it is
>> clear to me that there is a coding-practice debt in LilyPond.
>> Standards of how and when to do certain things are not shared across
>> all programmers, and things that seem commonsensical for some do not
>> seem so for others.
>>
>> Rather than letting this continue to be problematic, I'd like to
>> establish a sort of GLISS for LilyPond coding style.  We would discuss
>> certain conventions in the codebase to see where commonalities lie in
>> the codebase and where things could be made to look more similar.
>
> That's the wrong approach for coding guidelines since it assumes that
> "commonalities in the code base" suggest a reasonable coding practice.
>
> The vast majority of the LilyPond code base is not coded with
> maintainability or transparency to third-party programmers in mind.
>
> If you want an example of reasonable documenting and coding practice,
> take tex.web (it is public domain), run it through weave and pdftex and
> peruse significant extracts of the resulting PDF.

While tex.web is a beautiful example of literate programming, it was

a. created by one the worlds' foremost computer scientists.
b. created for a program whose behavior and code was to be set in stone.

I think that looking at tex.web will not give anyone practical answers
on how to structure their lilypond code.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen