Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?

[Adam Spiers]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 02:30 AM, Adam Spiers wrote:
>>
>> I don't follow your logic here at all.  Being large and complex
>> doesn't rule it out from being a starting point.  If it *wasn't*
>> large, there wouldn't be as much to gain from starting with it
>> vs. starting from scratch.
>
> You make two rather big assumptions -- first, that writing a big application
> from scratch is difficult (for a highly-skilled team, it's not necessarily).

I strongly disagree, unless your definition of "difficult" ignores
the time dimension of such a project.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

> Second, that starting from scratch is necessarily a bad thing.
>
> In fact, starting afresh can be very desirable.
>
> It's not actually "from scratch" because this team has huge amounts
> of knowhow from their years of experience,

Know-how and experience do not enable large, functional code-bases to
be magically constructed in short time spans.  They help increase
velocity and quality, but any new code-base takes a long time to grow.
I already mentioned this here:

    http://blog.steinberg.net/2013/02/welcome/#comment-207

> but because they are writing a completely new codebase, they do
> not have to be constrained by historical mistakes or backwards
> compatibility.

Nor would they be constrained by these if they started with LilyPond.

> They have a great opportunity to make new architectural and design
> choices.

As they do if they started with LilyPond.

> Building on top of other people's code is a good thing only if that code
> really supports what you want to do -- and there's probably more than a few
> free software projects that have had cause to regret deriving from an
> existing code base which in the long run turned out to not really be
> suitable.

Finally we can agree on something ;-)  But Daniel Spreadbury already
admitted that they haven't even looked at the LilyPond and MuseScore
code, therefore they have dismissed the possibility even before doing
a technical feasibility study.