Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[David Kastrup]

Tim McNamara <address@hidden> writes:

> On May 28, 2012, at 1:17 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
>> 
>>> As great as Lilypond's output is, there is a long way to go in terms
>>> of simplification and usability (the syntax needs to be simplified
>>> dramatically; a lot of the code users have to write is pretty ugly and
>>> is going to scare off potential users).  Having someone working full
>>> time on Lilypond is a great way to get that done in under a decade.
>> 
>> The syntax will _not_ be simplified dramatically since LilyPond,
>> overall, has a reasonably simple syntax.  
>
> "Dramatic" may have been over-stated, although to the non-programmer
> like me the syntax of Lilypond is far from simple- it seems
> exceedingly complex and much of it is like magic incantations which
> are spoken but the meaning is not really known.  And that's not even
> including Scheme and grobs and all that stuff.
>
> I was thinking about simplification like being able to put in a coda
> with \coda or a segno with \segno instead of things like
>
>  \mark \markup { \musicglyph #"scripts.segno" }
>
> and so on.  The more complicated the incantations are, the easier it
> is to get them wrong the harder it is to debug and the longer it takes
> to write.

Yup, but that's more or less a matter of writing simple substitutions,
and _simple_ substitutions would usually already have worked with 2.12.
This does not really require syntax changes, merely some definitions.
This is more a matter of making choices than writing code.

-- 
David Kastrup