Re: Scheme syntax vs. other languages [was: Re: Appreciation / Financial support]

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 07/06/12 17:31, David Kastrup wrote:
>> I think that a larger barrier is actually the use of features like
>> modules in a non-documented and non-obvious way.
>
> Can you explain this in greater detail?  Would be useful to understand
> this better before replying to your earlier, longer message on the
> Scheme vs. D code.

It has nothing to do with Scheme vs D.  Look in the LilyPond internals
manual for everything containing "module".

>> There is a _lot_ of barriers involved, and quite a few that suck
>> royally.  But changing language would, in my opinion, do rather
>> little to address that.
>
> I'm not trying to pressure you to change the language in the short
> term.  What I am trying to do is to get you to give some long-term
> consideration towards some of the emerging languages which might offer
> a way to unify the internals, high-level stuff and scripting language,
> and _at the same time_ offer useful new language features and a
> friendlier language syntax.
>
> I'm not asking or expecting you to be convinced straight away,
> though. :-)

With all due respect: I've been a system programmer for more than 30
years, have written stuff in dozens of different languages including
writing object-oriented message passing stuff in assembly language (of
which I know maybe a dozen, some including all the cycle counts at one
time).  I've written complete systems including all the firmware and
compiled them with target compilers I wrote myself, bootstrapping them
on systems I wrote myself.  I know my way around compilers, systems and
programming languages.  If convincing me straight away does not work,
bringing in significant amounts of new information for changing that is
not likely going to be as easy as you apparently think.

>> One thing that's on my black list of uglinesses is the markup system
>> together with the markup macro.  This is non-robust, and interacts
>> with the module system and interpretation timing in non-trivial ways.
>>
>> It's one of those things that you can do in Scheme quite better (or
>> at all) than in many other languages, but where resisting the
>> temptation would have paid off.
>
> Again, can you explain in a little more detail?

The "Extending LilyPond" guide has sections about markup and markup list
commands and the markup macro.

What are you going to bring up for the sake of convincing me when I know
the weaknesses of the system better than you do?

-- 
David Kastrup