Re: [OT} Was "Re: Rounded beams"

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Matthew,

Too many straw men, ad absurdums, and other fallacies here.
I’m officially out of the conversation.

As indicated before, “Patches are always welcome."

Regards,
Kieren.

On Dec 17, 2015, at 11:03 PM, address@hidden wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
>> I just read through the Essay in its entirety, and found nothing which
>> suggests to me that Lilypond ever sacrifices clarity or functionality
>> for "visual artistry”.
> 
> That is not what I said.
> 
> A focus on creating beautiful output does not imply "sacrificing" clarity
> or functionality.  On the contrary, it seems reasonable to guess that
> clarity and functionality are best served by beautiful output, that is
> part of what beauty means in the context of music engraving, and the
> "Essay" asserts such a claim throughout.  There's also a specific point
> made near the start about exact alignment of bar lines between systems
> being bad.  Assertions about "beauty" and "art" are repeated constantly
> in that document, to the point that it sometimes comes across as
> protesting too much.  The "Essay" is unconvincing for that reason even
> though I agree with most of the points it's trying to make.
> 
>  and the avoidance of alignment is something to brag about.
> And excluding the possibility of curved beams in all cases, even as a
> manual override for scores with special nonstandard needs, in the context
> of a tool that attempts to cover a wide range of other unusual notation
> cases, seems to be a sacrifice of "functionality" right there.  For what
> purpose is LilyPond making that sacrifice?
> 
> It may simply be a technical limitation, and that may be the right
> decision in relation to costs and benefits:  adding a curved-beam feature
> would be very difficult in the current architecture, and the number of
> users with a reason to want it may be vanishingly small, so that the work
> isn't justified.  I'm not sure anyone in this discussion actually wants to
> use curved beams themselves, and there would be (laborious, but possible)
> ways to do it with more general graphics features if someone really did
> need it.
> 
> But don't claim that such a technical limitation is for our own good!
> 
> The statements that LilyPond doesn't do curved beams because users aren't
> smart enough to use such a feature wisely (when LilyPond can do plenty of
> other things that also look bad if misused, and has never been nor claimed
> to be a safe tool for the unwise) and LilyPond isn't about visual art
> (when there's a whole "Essay" stridently insisting that it is about visual
> art) are hard to credit.
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Skala
> address@hidden                 People before principles.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden