Jonathan Wilkes <[email protected]> writes: > This doesn't go at all toward one solution or the other, but it does > strongly point to this being a dev issue and not a user issue.
It depends on whether you consider the distinction between "dev" and "user" to be branded on people's foreheads. Then you can state things like "to extend, you should be able to recompile", but even with the most caste-conscious division between devs and users, this does not work as a community concept: because then the devs will not be able to help individual users with code snippets, when the latter can't compile them. In LilyPond, the Scheme reader and interpreter is just a # away. The line between LilyPond users and people extending LilyPond with Scheme is much more fuzzy and gradual than the line between those extending LilyPond with Scheme and those doing it with C++. Most of the proposals about juggling extension languages are focusing on the C++/Scheme border. That's not the important one for the community aspect. At least not its details, but rather how far away from the user you can push it by extending the reach of Scheme. The important border is that between LilyPond and Scheme. Here is where empowerment of the user happens. Or not. If poeple have some "that looks straightforward enough" experience and manage to make small adaptions, they are on a good road. "You are missing a semicolon" is something that can't happen with Scheme. As long as you can keep your parens matched, there are not many syntactical surprises regarding copy&paste of Scheme code. There is not much in the line of block structure, declarations, interface definitions, headers and so on. "Oh, this needs to be executed as part of a function" is rarely a consideration. People use more Scheme than they probably realize, and getting Scheme help by "devs" tends to work mostly unspectacularly. That's really not something one can take for granted in general concerning extension languages. That does not mean that it can't be improved. But it is easy to underestimate how much work it would take to arrive at net gains from a language/architecture switch. I don't think that the situation is in a state that starting from scratch would make a lot of sense. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
