Re: Scheme function to print out active Voice context during interpretation?

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 09:26:15PM +0100, Francisco Vila wrote:
> Is the code properly commented, so that (thinking on the future) new
> people can learn from it without having to figure out all the time
> what does each function, file etc. do? Sure, I can look at it and say,
> but I want the opinion of skilled programmers.
> 
> If not, is there any chance of this to improve?

In my (somewhat limited) experience, no matter how good the
documentation for source code, getting involved in a large project
is always easier if you have a mentor.  There's always little
details or tricks that a person can pass along that never make it
into the source docs... and besides, a mentor can tailor his
answers directly to your questions, rather than the general info
that you'd find in documentation.

That's why I was hoping that somebody would offer to be the
Frogmeister (you can have a non-silly name if you want!).  People
willing to spend time fixing bugs would gain a mentor to guide
them towards a better understanding of the source code, and the
mentor would gain more people fixing bugs in lilypond (which in
turn leads to a better program which presumably the mentor is
using :).


Sure, we could ask a skilled developer to spend 50 hours writing
better source docs... but I don't think that's a good trade-off.
Their time is so limited, and the number of potential developers
is so small, that I think that personal mentorship is the best way
to go.  Now, if one of those new developers wants to spend 5 hours
a week carefully documenting what he's learned about the internals
while fixing bugs, I certainly wouldn't object.  But of course,
that developer needs to consider the trade-offs involved: more bug
fixes?  Writing translations?  Documenting the source code?

Cheers,
- Graham