Guido writes:
| it seems clear to me that the recent difficulties in formulating a new (more
| complete? optimal? sub-optimal? troublesome?) syntax for V: are a
| testament of a lurking problem: ABC's inherent incapability (?) of dealing
| with *all* music in existance.
Heh. It may be a long time until we have computer notation that can
do that. No other notation system has ever managed the job. I've
found that a good way to test any supposedly great music software is
to try to get it to handle a tune such as ... Well, go to my tune
finder at:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html
Tell it to look for "Jovano" (without the quotes, of course). You'll
get four matches. Pick one with the key of Dphr^F, and ask for any of
the formats except MIDI. You should get music that has a time
signature of 7/8 and a key signature with two flats and one sharp.
I've found that commercial music packages invariably flunk out on one
or the other of these, and usually they refuse to accept either. Yet
this is a rather normal tune in Serbia, where you expect that even
children would find this tune simple and unremarkable.
One of the nice things about ABC is that I didn't have to wait for
some vendor to decide that my music is worth something commercially.
After giving up on the ABC development community, most of whom also
see no need for this sort of music, I just grabbed the abc2ps source
and hacked my own version that does such things right. If the rest of
the ABC gang decides that such extensions aren't worthwhile, I still
have my own extended software that can handle it.
This is an old story in most of the Open Source software development
community. If a minority of users needs something that the prime
movers don't consider worthwhile, they can form a branch of the
software that handles their needs. All it takes is one programmer.
The prime movers then have a choice: They can incorporate the new
features into the mainline software, or they can accept the fact that
there's a "renegade" branch out there that is out of control. But
they can't suppress significant minority groups like the commercial
crowd can. This sort of extension has happened repeatedly in the
history of perl, whose prime movers have seen fit to incorporate most
such extensions into their "pathologically eclectic" language. This
is a lot of why perl has been so successful.
In my (not so humble) opinion, this is another of the great strengths
of ABC. It is usable by musicians like me right now, and there's not
a thing that anyone can do to exclude us. It's about the only music
software around for which this is true. Maybe XML will give such
freedom in the far future, but not today. It's not very easy to
learn, marketing hype aside, and it's unlikely that more than a tiny
minority of musicians will every learn anything about it.
| This is to say that ABC could follow the same path. There could be a version
| 1.7.* which follows the current syntax (strict separation between header and
| music, mandatory K: as last header field, etc) and a new version 2.*.* which
| introduces all of the new features and ideas we can throw at it. Conversion
| tools will help the transition. As a (rusty) programmer, I guess it
| shouldn't be too hard writing such tools.
Not a bad scenario at all. Various programming languages have
followed this approach, especially perl and tcl, and it can work very
well.
| After a couple of years or so, the new format could politely take over. And
| voila - a beatiful, 99.999% complete ABC language! Then we could start again
| to fix the remaining .001%...
Maybe. There's always the Second System Syndrome to fight. And don't
forget that we are musicians. What's the chance on us ever agreeing
about anything?
It's more likely that we'll end up like the C language, with spinoff
languages that aren't very competitive with the original language and
aren't an improvement for a lot of its users. So C continues to be
heavily used, and the C++ and java folks can't understand out why
everyone doesn't convert.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
