Re: Steinberg's progress report on new notation software

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 08.08.2013 13:13, schrieb David Kastrup:
>>
>> He does have misconceptions about LilyPond, but his blog is not the
>> place to address them.  Yes, that's unfortunate, but please behave
>> like one would expect guests to behave.  We are not doing our case a
>> favor by making a spectacle where it is not asked for.
>>
> I think it is interesting to compare the suggested new features to the
> behaviour of other programs, and I would like to read about that from
> other perspectives too.

Ok, let's put ourselves in his shoes.  He is coming from Sibelius (and
knows it quite well), and he is going to a Steinberg based project that
is in its early beginnings.

It's his blog, so our focus should be on "what is he interested in
knowing and talking about" rather than "what can we hijack his audience
for".

Now one problem is that it's actually rather hard to sensibly talk about
_any_ music typesetting program other than LilyPond since with LilyPond
you can cut and paste an example of how to do things.  With other
programs, you are mostly reduced to cutting and pasting the _results_.

So if you state something like "With LilyPond, I do x with the following
source, and get the following result, how do you do that with y?", you
are basically asking a question to a dumb.  He can probably _show_ you
how to do it, but he can't easily tell you.  In addition, his own
project is in its infancy, so he could likely not even _show_ you how
this will at one time work, and parading the capabilities of a program
grown over dozens of years is putting him on the defensive.

So most of the questions regarding how to input things will not yield
useful answers and/or can only be answered in respect to existing
software, and that is not really what the blog is about.

> I hope I didn't do more in my comments.

Well, if enough people only slightly overstep a line, it will disappear.
I think it would make sense to expand on most followup thoughts in our
own blog, once they can't be expected to be of much interest to Daniel.

While he will be able to answer competently about Sibelius, again this
is not what his blog is about.

So far, he has been polite in his reactions and I commend him for that.
But the question you should ask yourself is what chances you have to
make him interested or enjoyed in his reactions.  If you can't think of
anything, remember that this is basically his "home" on the web.

It's like "a protestant has invited me over to dinner, what should I
tell him about hell and Mary?".  Or the seven hells or whatever.

-- 
David Kastrup