Re: Urs Liska Scheme book not accessible

[Knute Snortum]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 3:45 PM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
> If you clone the repository, the Markdown input
> is pretty readable in plain text.

If you're not sure about cloning a repository, you can also download a
zip file.  It's an option after you press the code button.

> > Is the website/project dead for good or it will be back eventually?
> > I'm really looking to get more serious with Scheme and any resources I
> > can find certainly help.
>
>
> I want to mention here that not so long ago I also
> wrote a Scheme tutorial in French:
...
> I could translate mine into English (modulo finding the
> time since my contributor's stack is quite full at the moment).
> I'm not sure if this is the best way to go: do people
> here have experience or desires on how much a Scheme
> tutorial that would be or have been useful for them
> should be targeted at complete programming novices (as
> opposed to people who know other programming languages
> though possibly only imperative ones), and the extent to
> which it should go into the details and concepts?

I think this would be *very* useful, as many (most?) people who use
LilyPond aren't programmers.  I was a programmer, but Scheme is so
foreign to me that it's almost like I'm a non-programmer, so true
non-programmers would be very lost without a tutorial.

>
> A last consideration is that LilyPond's documentation itself
> contains a Scheme tutorial:
>
> https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/extending/scheme-in-lilypond
>
> In its current state, it's not really useful to learn Scheme
> (I say this from not so old experience). However, it could
> be a target for introducing a better resource that would
> be updated at the same time as the rest of the documentation
> when LilyPond moves forward. On the other hand, official LilyPond
> documentation isn't the place to put loads of information about
> the elements of Scheme dissected: there is no point in
> asking LilyPond contributors to track and update documentation
> that is not directly linked to LilyPond.
>
> Thoughts on this?

I avoid Scheme as much as possible in the scores, but there are times
when it's unavoidable.  If Scheme is going to be the mechanism to
unlock advanced features in LilyPond, then there should be a good
tutorial on that.

--
Knute Snortum