Re: Website: Provide LilyPond source together with the example output

[David Kastrup]

Reinhold Kainhofer <address@hidden> writes:

> Am Mittwoch, 24. August 2011, 13:43:43 schrieb Janek Warchoł:
>> 2011/8/24 Štěpán Němec <address@hidden>: I think that David's
>> point was that the scores are too big and complex to be shown in
>> their entirety, because they'll scare beginners.  I think he suggests
>> that the "mouse-over bubble" would show only a small part of the
>> code, directly relevant the the object pointed to.
>
> What's the point of showing some code that you can't copy and compile
> in its entirety? That's even more pointless.

A user looking for information about Lilypond will not be able to copy
and compile code in its entirety, period.  Because he does not even have
Lilypond installed.

The point is to not just show what you can achieve with Lilypond
(Lilypond can't produce any score that would be of a higher quality than
a score produced by Inkscape, if you work long enough on the latter),
but also what kind of effort it takes, and what kind of input, and how
you can learn about it.

For me "if you create the following 20-letter input on a keyboard with
an editor of your liking, the following construct will fall out" is much
more compelling than "if you click 50 menu items in a hierarchy usually
hidden 3 layers deep in the right manner and fine-adjust the results by
pushing the material around manually (we have a video to show you the
sequence done by a master, as one can't reliably describe something like
that in text), you'll get the following result.".

Like a musician usually prefers "if you like to play this music, I can
sell you a score" over "if you like to play this music, I can sell you
lessons until you know it by heart".  Which is the point of notation in
the first place.

> We shouldn't show the code by default, that's what we all agree, I
> think. But we should make it possible for the users to easily download
> the whole code for each example to that they can start playing with
> it.

Red herring, different purpose.  Nobody has proposed withholding the
source code on principle.  The question was what to turn into a part of
the presentation.  And the source code as a whole is just not suitable
for that.

> A click on the image shows an enlarged image (which we shouldn't
> change to showing the code), but we can add a "Download LilyPond code"
> linke next to the image. That would be the best solution, IMO.

People won't be able to make the connection between picture and source,
since the source is just one humongous block.

-- 
David Kastrup