Re: Lilypond structure / implicit - explicit / with statement

[David Kastrup]

David Sumbler <address@hidden> writes:

> I have been using Lilypond for a few years now (but admittedly there
> are always periods of weeks or months at a time when I haven't touched
> it, which of course makes things much more difficult to retain).
>
> I still find the whole thing rather cryptic,

It's not cryptic as much as complex.  Scheme is an integral part of
LilyPond's user interface, and Scheme is a general-purpose programming
language that's not particularly cherished even among programmers,
partially because its single-minded use of punctuation (parens are
basically all there is) does not really match the way in which we
structure natural text in modern Western languages (the ancient Greek
would likely have found little wrong in just running everything together
in one block).

If you are not on top of the underlying complexity, you need to follow
instructions and recipes and conventions.  There is nothing wrong with
that, but the more complexity and exceptions bleed into the recipes, and
the less those recipes appear to follow a pattern, the harder it becomes
to be comfortable working with the system.

The main question people ask themselves is "what's in it for me?".  And
what's in it is that LilyPond is very flexible in the things it can be
made to solve automatically.

This pays off in the form of people being able to _help_ others like on
this mailing list.  But also in the form of prepackaged functionality.

> I myself have even had thoughts lately of cutting my losses,
> installing a DOS emulator and going back to using Score!  I can't
> remember much about how Score is used, but I do remember that I
> published quite a number of arrangements and compositions in the late
> '90s using Score, and that getting to grips with it was a fraction of
> the effort I have needed (and still need) to understand how to do
> things in Lilypond.  Yet Score's output is commonly regarded still as
> pretty much first-rate.

Doing things like piano extracts and partiture and transpositions from
the same sources (but, for example, employing different accidental
styles) is going to be more trouble, I'd guess.  LilyPond talks more
about the music itself rather than the typesetting of it.

-- 
David Kastrup