Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[Tim McNamara]

On Jun 4, 2012, at 8:30 AM, Jeff Barnes wrote:
>> From: Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden>
>> 
>> On 30/05/12 02:12, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
>>> One of the problems of LilyPond is that C++ had very poor support for
>>> things we desperately need: reflection, automatic memory management
>>> and callbacks.
>> 
>> How about D?
> 
> Also, consider Qt. It has all of the above. Qt makes it pretty easy for devs 
> who started out with higher-level languages to become productive in C++.

See, here is the problem.  There appear to be about 500 languages which could 
be used for writing the core application and writing ways to extend it.  It 
seems that someone with too much time on their hands is inventing a new 
language every damn day.  They all have their strengths and weaknesses.  But 
here are the key things:  

1.  Lilypond needs to be portable to run natively on all of the major 
platforms:  Windows, Mac and Linux/BSD/etc. with as little re-coding as 
possible.

2.  In order to have people writing the code, the languages used should be 
already in wide use so that developers don't have to learn a new language and 
install new APIs.  Mature, well-understood languages will reduce the likelihood 
of introducing new bugs.  


It becomes alphabet soup watching people toss the language of the moment into 
the discussion.