Re: Re: Lilypond structure / implicit - explicit / with statement

[Johannes Waldmann]

interesting discussion!

> My ultimate question boils down to how to assign
> a value to a property. That should not even be a question.

That ("should not be a question") depends on the mental model.
Why do you assume that a property is assignable, or in fact
that a (sub)program should consist of (state-changing) statements?
I guess because of your OO programming background (you mentioned it).
But in (pure) functional programming, there are no assignments
(no state) at all, and that happens to be my preferred mental model.

This is not a question of right or wrong -
history shows that both models are useful.
The question is to convey to the user
the model that was used in the design of the language/system.
You described this as "making implicit knowledge explicit".

The docs do make considerable effort to explain, e.g.,
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/learning/contexts-and-engravers
 .
If at all, I might criticize this for being in the wrong order:
2. Common Notation, 3. Fundamental Concepts - but how can we
use or learn a language (syntax, notation) without knowing
its underlying semantical model first?

E.g., my lilypond learning problem (I think)
is to find out how much of lilypond is pure data
(music as an expressions, nested by sequential and parallel composition)
and how much is procedural (music as execution of events,
that is, of statements)
and when and how to switch between these models (if at all).

- J.