A usability anecdote

[David Kastrup]

Hi,

I just took the material from
<URL:http://nicolas.sceaux.free.fr/prelude/prelude.html> and took a look
of how the current developer version may help in making things nicer to
a user.  There is a lot in there (and I think it will make an appearance
in the next LilyPond report) but one thing that happened is that

  \midi { \tempo 4 = 80 }

made Lilypond complain.  convert-ly was able to fix this and produced:

  \midi {
    \context {
      \Score
      tempoWholesPerMinute = #(ly:make-moment 80 4)
      }
    }

That is not particularly pretty, so I tried something else, and lo and
behold:

  \midi {
    \context {
      \Score
      \with \settingsFrom { \tempo 4 = 80 }
      }
    }

actually works fine.  Considering that \settingsFrom was actually done
to close an issue concerning accident styles, I consider this payoff in
a completely unrelated area a nice side effect.  Not as easy as the
simplistic version that worked with Lilypond 2.5, but it does not
require the user to call Scheme, does not require knowing about
tempoWholesPerMinute, and one can easily guess what it does by looking
at it.

-- 
David Kastrup