Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages

[Michael Hendry]

I’m a 68 year-old retired GP.

I took up guitar aged 15, playing folk and rock stuff by ear, although I had 
learned piano long enough in primary school to know what a staff looked like, 
and I played in folk clubs and bands until medicine took over.

After a long career break(!), I took up guitar again when I retired, and went 
through a part-time jazz course at St Andrews University. Local musicians I 
play with tend to use Band-in-a-Box for lead-sheets, but this didn’t work for 
the course’s solo transcriptions, and essays which required notation mixed in 
with the text.

I tried Sibelius, but was frustrated by the lack of transparency in what it did 
(a simple modification tended to have hard-to-eradicate side-effects), and I 
discovered LilyPond.

Having a hobbyist interest in electronics, I encountered microprocessors in the 
1970s, and built a couple of kit computers in the late seventies and early 
eighties, acquiring some programming experience in hand-assembly, assembler, 
BASIC and Pascal in the eighties, and with C in the nineties.

My requirements of Lilypond are minimal in comparison to the professionals on 
the list, and such challenges as I’ve put to the list appear to have been 
solved within minutes by the experts!

As a poor reader, I’m grateful for the MIDI facility which helps me proof-read 
my puny and time-consuming efforts at transcription.

It strikes me that Lilypond appeals to programmers who do a bit of music and 
musicians who do a bit of programming - I’ve struggled to “sell” it to 
musicians who aren’t into programming.

Michael