Re: [GLISS] differentiating pre/post/neutral commands

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Graham Percival writes:

> Really?  In terms of the \./ pre-post-neutral idea, I found
> Werner, Xavier, Nicolas, Janek, Keith, and Valentin (private
> email) more convincing than you and Han-Wen.

Maybe I can help.  Let's start with this reminder

    $ git blame -e parser.yy|awk '{print $3;}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -n
          1 (<address@hidden>
          2 (<address@hidden>
         17 (<address@hidden>
        400 (<address@hidden>
       1214 (<address@hidden>
       1335 (<address@hidden>

While it looks like I may be holding middle ground here, note
how both Han-Wen and David consider my language ramblings as
mostly non-authoritive.

Han-Wen and I had endless discussions about syntax.  Most of them fairly
accurately resembled the discussions that we've seen about GLISS so far.
Most of them were initiated by me and, as you can see, most that were
eventually turned into code (for better or for worse) were implemented
by Han-Wen.  These sometimes heated discussions were amongst the most
unproductive and probably least enjoyable hours of being together.

"We must be as easy ABC" and "layout details/directions must be isolated
from pure musical content" were my mantras, with the idea that the most
important things were usability and pure musical definition.

The reason that these discussions were so difficult were that I had the
idea that they were very important and Han-Wen thought they were mostly
irrelevant or counterproductive.  With hindsight, I mostly agree.

On the one hand I very much appreciate the ideas and proposals, because
they tell me that people really care about our user interface.  This is
what people see of LilyPond and so it is easy to identify LilyPond by
it.  On the other hand, everything that does not result in a nice patch
is useless.  Or worse than useless if it wastes the development time of
David (and the courtesy time of Han-Wen).

In any case, improving the output is often much more valuable than
changing an \ into an /, for example.  We used to have a FAQ about this,
declining any language change proposals.  "Wouldn't it be nice if
... you only need to change this detail in the input".

I think that what Han-Wen and David are trying to tell you is: yes, we
could do with some language cleanups.  Here's how you can help.  Start
working on the parser.  Changes small things, make it better.  Once you
finally work yourself up to the authority level of Jan, you're probably
still not in a position to propose and judge big changes.  But keep up
the good work.  Good luck!

Jan

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
Freelance IT http://JoyofSource.com | Avatar®  http://AvatarAcademy.nl