Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[David Kastrup]

Francisco Vila <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/6/1 Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden>:
>> For me, the complexity of LilyPond itself outplays learning a new
>> programming language by far.
>
> In other words, saying "Who's going to learn LilyPond? Nobody will!"
> is more or less the same as saying "Who is going to learn Scheme to
> contribute to LilyPond? Nobody will!". Despite of what I've been
> trying to convince myself for ages, at the end [possibly] LilyPond is
> for geeks only.

Who is going to learn reading notes, let alone writing them?  Of course
LilyPond is only for geeks, because it is just geeks who bother with
writing music rather than listening to it.

> Geeks among geeks are who will learn whatever it is necessary to learn
> for contributing. For example, contributors to LaTeX packages have to
> learn hardcore lowlevel TeX and all those cryptic @-commands. I am
> surprised on how many of them there are; the fact is that many
> packages exist and they are made by geeks^2. Scheme looks easy to me
> by comparison.

It is a matter of how much you can achieve with what effort.  If you get
a good return of investment on your learning curve, you will go further
eventually.  "Now learn compiling software and writing C++" is a bit of
a discontinuity, and the minimum amount of C++ you need to learn before
starting to be able to work on LilyPond at all appears larger to me than
the minimal amount of Scheme.

-- 
David Kastrup