crankiness

[Gerard McConnell]

I've been looking at the Re: date in footer  thread;  I can understand how the experts get annoyed. They're doing lots of
volunteer work to develop what is a really beautiful (but horrendously difficult to learn) program, and figure that the rest of

us should be doing our bit to sort out the documentation and snippets.    I'm sure we'd all like to help, but as a new user

I think it would be presumptuous of me to start rewriting/reorganizing documentation, don't you think?   However, I must

dispute one comment that I read in the thread:

 
"The current person responsible for LSR also happens to be the most
active patch-reviewer.  Do you *really* want me to ask him to stop
working on patches (i.e. new features, bug fixes, etc) and waste
his time playing web-2.0 games that anybody with TWO BLOODY WEEKS
OF LILYPOND EXPERIENCE could do?!

 

The critical word in the above quote is waste.  Although I'm not a professional programmer (I'm a piano teacher), at one time

I dipped my toes in the water and completed a MSc in multimedia development.   I came away from that experience with the
conviction that good documentation is critically important. I believe that If Lilypond is to develop the widest possible user base and
get the recognition it deserves the clarity and conciseness of the documentation is perhaps as important as the application itself.  
So, like I said,  Lilypond is a really great application, but learning to use it is exceptionally hard work.  MUCH harder than learning
Music Publisher, Notator, Cubase Score, Finale, etc.    Please be patient with the users; we're trying to learn it not just
because it's free, but because it's excellent.