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Re: Quit [now definitely O/T]


From: Jesús Guillermo Andrade
Subject: Re: Quit [now definitely O/T]
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:07:26 -0430

Hello there!... 
El 12/11/2009, a las 04:11 a.m., David Kastrup escribió:

Continued on developer list.

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:

As a new contributor/developer, by using a different, and a particular
unfriendly platform for free software development, you are faced with
tackling several difficult problems at once.
access to the Elisp data structures.  _If_ Emacs has the principal
capabilities for some task, you can code the whole task in Elisp.  This
does not appear to be doable with Lilypond's Scheme.  At least not to
the degree where it is the preferred way of thinking about new tasks.

Lilypond's Scheme is GUILE's Scheme. And the fact you are pointing out is repeatedly found on hundreds of blogs around the internet , whenever some Java/C/C++ programmer is faced with Scheme/Lisp. They all have said the same thing: How come we have to use such and old language, when we have such great new (and modern!)  new ones that could handle everything easily?
Fashionability is the keyword here. Java, for example, with all the bell and whistles it has, is *barely* (from a distance) catching up with Lisp. Sure, there are more books being sold by thie X language, or it sounds more fashianble to work this Y language in the opensource community but then what?...  would lilypond's owners have to change the whole concept behind it in order to bring up more programmers? 
Is there a need for programming language or interfaces other than the ones already in? I think not. 
Perhaps the project need more people *organizing* the information regarding the interfaces and polishing the syntax... I would not know what the higher powers would want. 

For a start from scratch, Lua would be a nice choice: message-passing
coroutines (very nice for translators keeping context!), procedural
syntax, very portable, fast.  And you can learn everything worth knowing
about it in few days.
Why not Java? or Objective C for that matter?... Or Ada, or COBOL, or ALGOL or Fortran, or ... hmmm... gosh... there are so many. In the beggining (1958) there were only 2. And currently just Lisp stays strong and way ahead of all others in terms of flexibility, scalabilty and freedom to do whatever anybody might want. 


I can actually understand and work with the Lua coroutines.  In
contrast, I am not sure that trying to solve tasks with Scheme...

That is a problem of perspective that is faced with all programmers that have ever read one line of scheme/lisp code. The problem has historical roots and has been documented elsewere. Notwithstanding, there are several ways to overcome this perpective limitation.

Scheme might not be the nicest language for programming, but being able
to solve everything important in some application in _one_ language
without need of recompiling (or heap management) or language interfacing
would be a good step towards recruiting new programmers and solving
tasks, partly in form of libraries or packages which can be just used
on-demand rather than needing to be compiled in.

Where can I vote? 

Guillermo


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