Re: Do we really offer the future?

[James Harkins]

On April 22, 2015 7:43:10 PM "Trevor Daniels" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Although not well-publicised there is a way of entering multi-voice or 
> multi-staff music complete bar by complete bar.  There is a restriction 
> that bars must be all the same length, but at least all the notes of a bar 
> are entered together and remain close together in the LP source.
>
> See 
> http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/multiple-voices#writing-music-in-parallel

Thanks for the tip - I wasn't aware of this. I'm outside on my phone now, 
not ideal for reading the documentation, so I can't comment specifically 
except to guess that it may be impractical for large, complex projects.

Going back to the general topic: I don't think the solution is necessarily 
to extend the LilyPond language. LP is *very* good at what it does. But 
David's comment that LP is a language to organize grobs, rather than 
*principally* a language to organize music, is insightful. Viewed this way, 
it's then unsurprising that LP, in a couple of glaring ways, doesn't always 
mesh with the needs of working musicians.

The fact that LP is so good at what it does means that it's quite likely a 
bad idea to alter its nature fundamentally. But a higher-level 
representation could abstract the details of LP code organization away from 
the user and present a "face" that supports more "musical" editing 
capabilities. That's a massive job, of course, but it would also not break 
backward compatibility with existing LP projects.

I'm influenced here by my experience with LaTeX, which I use almost 
exclusively by way of Emacs's org-mode [1]. In org, I make outlines where 
the outline entries are sections or subsections (or Beamer frames), with 
free text and itemized lists inside. Org markup is lighter and friendlier 
than raw LaTeX: *bold* instead of \textbf{bold}, e.g., so I get the 
advantage of improved readability while editing without losing LaTeX's 
superior typesetting. The org exporter converts the outline tree into LaTeX 
and automatically runs the LaTeX executable of your choice. I need to write 
raw LaTeX only for customizing, and a couple of corner cases that org 
doesn't handle easily. It's >expletive deleted< GREAT!!

For LP, this is pie-in-the-sky dreaming -- I haven't the time or the 
immediate need. And GridLY may supply some of this -- I'm quite interested 
and I'll take a look for my next project. But I think there's no harm in 
admitting that LP is not ideally suited to many practical needs, and 
imagining that abstraction (rather than extension of the core language) is 
a valid solution.

hjh

[1] http://orgmode.org

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