Re: Old LilyPond versions

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:42:15 +0200
Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden> wrote:

> Quoting Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> 
> > On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:14:42 -0400
> > Laura Conrad <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> >> The grumpy doc writer has said many times that he knows nothing
> >> about vocal music.  None of the suggestions in 5.1 is going to
> >> change the fact that manual conversion is necessary for all vocal
> >> music transcribed before 2.4.
> >
> > You're talking about the old LaTeX accents -> utf-8 ?
> 
> No, probably rather about \lyricsto and \addlyrics.

Hmm.  According to our docs, that was 2.0->2.2... and I can't see
what the problem was.

1)  it might be nice to give some more info about this, so that
people *can* make these updates manually.

2)  it would of course be nice to automate this.  At the moment, I
can't see why this would take more than five hours.  Maybe 15
hours if the person had never touched python before.


As before, I'm not offering to do anything myself, but I'll
happily mentor anybody who's interested.

I'm very serious about this -- one of my "day jobs" is being a TA
in computer science, and so far I've always been teaching
first-year non-CS students how to use excel, access, and a tiny
bit of java programming.  They hate the programming because it has
no relevance to them, and I can't honestly disagree... especially
when their assignments are silly things like "write a program that
calculates the interest compounded daily, monthly, and yearly" --
that calls for a spreadsheet, not compiled language!

By my rough calculations, teaching a complete programming novice
how to solve a problem they're *interested* in solving would be
10 times easier and approximately 15 billion times more fun than
being a TA.

In addition, this is a relatively easy problem to tackle for
novices.  Python + text file processing is a very nice
combination.


Of course, it all depends on volunteers, and that depends on how
much work it would be to translate everything by hand.  If it
would take 15 hours of learning programming to save 50 hours of
manual lilypond updating, it's obviously a good choice.  If it
would take 20 hours of programming to save 2 hours of manual
lilypond updating, it's probably not a good choice... although the
finished program could still be useful for other people, so it
might still be worth it.

Cheers,
- Graham