Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages

[H. S. Teoh]

[...]
> > On Sep 10, 2015, at 7:00 AM, Peter Bjuhr <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > On 2015-08-26 22:10, Urs Liska wrote:
> >>> This thread makes me wonder: what's the average age of LilyPond
> >>> users and developers?
> >> Remind me in two weeks and I'll start a poll on Scores of Beauty ...
> > 
> > I send in this reminder not because I'm especially interested in
> > ages, but it would be interesting to know more about stuff like
> > editor usage and if LilyPond is used for original compositions or
> > for engraving existing compositions.
[...]

I'm 40, and use LilyPond primarily for my own original compositions,
both for typesetting and for midi output.  On a few occasions I've
transcribed a few simple pieces here and there, mainly for my own
studies, and sometimes short snippets of other composers' pieces for
analysis/critique purposes.

Since I'm a programmer by profession, I have no problem with using
LilyPond's text-only input directly (via vim) -- in fact, I prefer
working that way. The text-based input format has made it easy to write
helper programs and scripts that allow me to work around limitations in
LilyPond's midi output capabilities, and I've managed to get quite
decent midi output that way.

(In fact, I've been able to automate the rather elaborate process of
splitting a score into instrument choirs rendered into separate midi
files, to work around the midi 15-channel limit, automatically render
each of them via a software synth and merging them back into a single
audio file using the audio processing program sox. The flexibility of
LilyPond's input format greatly helped in making this possible.)


--T