Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?

[Adam Spiers]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:51 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Adam Spiers <address@hidden> writes:
>> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 5:22 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Adam Spiers <address@hidden> writes:
>>>> I just blogged about this:
>>>>
>>>> http://blog.adamspiers.org/2013/02/25/music-industry-learns-nothing-from-the-avid-sibelius-saga/
>>>
>>> Well, I see some fatally flawed assumptions here, riding on your notion
>>> "both MuseScore and GNU LilyPond would serve as excellent starting
>>> points for a world-class music notation product."
>>>
>>> Now I can't vouch for MuseScore, but GNU LilyPond is anything but a
>>> "starting point" for software development.  It is large with an
>>> elaborate and complex architecture.  And most particularly, an
>>> architecture that is not the core expertise of the former Sibelius
>>> development team.
>>
>> I don't follow your logic here at all.  Being large and complex
>> doesn't rule it out from being a starting point.
>
> "Listen, engineering team, we have assembled to design and build the
> most successful family car ever.  We don't have to start from scratch: I
> already secured a shipment of 10000 trucks we can use as a starting
> point."

That metaphor is invalid, because (a) we're not dealing with a process
which involves volume production, and (b) you can't refactor a truck.

> Being large is of advantage if the quality is consistent.

>From what I've seen, LilyPond's quality is fairly consistent.  You may
disagree and of course you have a lot more experience with it than I
do, but that will also calibrate your judgement so that your perceived
range of "bad" to "good" is likely much narrower than those of us who
are regularly exposed to far lower and/or higher quality code.

> Being complex is a legacy.  The LilyPond code base is not good in
> confining complexity.
>
>> There are plenty of prominent examples where fresh projects succeeded
>> by inheriting a large and complex codebase.  Firefox is one, and
>> LibreOffice another; here's a great talk I attended at FOSDEM
>> demonstrating precisely this:
>>
>> http://video.fosdem.org/2013/maintracks/Janson/LibreOffice__cleaning_and_re_factoring_a_giant_code_base.webm
>>
>> Those code-bases make LilyPond's look about as complex as two lines of
>> BASIC ;-)
>
> You are confusing large and complex.

Nope.  I'm well aware of the difference, but there is an undeniable
correlation between the two.  I challenge you to find any pair of
reasonably well-written projects over (say) 10k LoC where one is at
least ten times the size of the other and yet less complex.