Sorry, I initially just sent this to Jan and meant to send it to the
group.
On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:11 AM, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
Op donderdag 12-11-2009 om 08:41 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef David
Kastrup:
Carl Sorensen <[email protected]> writes:
_Addressing_ the actual problems is definitely more suitably done
on the
developer list.
So what are the actual problems? Is LilyPond really too difficult?
Well, in a word, yes. OK, that's too glib because the second
question is "too difficult for what" and that wasn't asked. It's too
difficult (as in the learning curve is too steep and seems
practically infinite) for the majority of casual users who will give
it a try. You do have to look at it through naive eyes to see that
the start of the learning curve is like standing at the base of
Monolith when all one wanted was to go for a little hike.
I have mastered LilyPond just enough to do the simple jazz lead
sheets I need (and am not quite there yet- I get flummoxed by
something on every other score). I've tried to interest a lot of
fellow jazz musicians (some of them college professors, high powered
professionals and some pro musicians, all of them quite intelligent)
and to a person they threw up their hands within minutes. I know one
other jazz musician who uses LilyPond, the rest use Finale (or just
do charts by hand). Once one has to resort to hacks to get stuff
done, it becomes a brute-force approach which is beyond the interest
of (IMHO) the vast majority of users.
Do we rely too much on crufty input-language solutions?
It happens pretty quickly on pretty simple charts that one has to use
overrides and the like to get glyphs to position correctly, which
means that new users are likely very frustrated with output issues
(e.g., "why is the coda glyph appearing there when I put it here?").
It makes for inelegant code in the .ly file and a greater likelihood
of the input being broken with each upgrade, causing trouble and
frustration for the user.
There does not have to be a GUI to make it simple and easy to use.
Text input is fine, it just has to have a clear, consistent and
predictable input syntax which makes it simple to position notes,
rests, bars, text, lyrics, glyphs and structural things like
repeats. It's almost there, but having to read hundreds of pages of
arcane documentation to produce a one page lead sheet remains
problematic.
How many ritardando-like hacks do we have for common problems? Are
they listed/categorised somewhere?
Much of the LSR contains such hacks. Isn't that what it's for? It
seems to me that there are hundreds of hacks in the LSR to make
LilyPond do something that the standard markup language cannot do, or
at least can't do readily.
Now, don't get me wrong. LilyPond produces better looking sheet
music than anything else I have seen. It's amazingly powerful and
can do a gigantic variety of things, which is both a strength and its
Achilles' heel. But it's also like Emacs using LaTeX in its
complexity and power while most potential users are just looking for
NotePad.
One question is how LilyPond positions itself in the market. As it
currently stands, it is not for the average user. It is an
application squarely aimed at power users who enjoy the problem-
solving aspect of dealing with using two different languages
simultaneously (LilyPond's LaTeX-like markup language and Scheme) and
don't mind the challenge of making the application produce the output
you want. It is not for the musician who just wants a chart with a
minimum of fuss and time. There's nothing wrong with that, other
than that the former market is small and the latter market is large-
and there's nothing wrong with that either. The market for a Lexus
LFA is small, the market for a Toyota Corolla is large. If LilyPond
is intended to be a Lexus, then things are pretty fine. If it is
intended to be a Corolla, then there is a lot of fundamental work to
be done on the user-friendliness of the markup language.
People often get mad when things like this are said because it seems
to negate the hundreds or thousands of hours they put into
development. I certainly do not mean to do that and hope that no one
takes it that way. As I said earlier, LilyPond is an amazingly
powerful program. But that power may mean that it has a limited
market appeal. NotePad has probably three orders of magnitude more
users than Emacs for the same reasons- relatively few users need the
power and flexibility of Emacs because they just want to write a
quick note to Aunt Martha. There is nothing wrong with that. It may
very well be that trying to cater to casual users who just want to
make a simple score or a rock tune or a folk song or something like
that is not realistic for LilyPond. Nothing wrong with that either.
It's a badass powerful music engraving application, after all.
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