Re: architecture document?

[David Rogers]

Tom Sgouros <tomfool@as220.org> writes:

> Hello all:
>
> I've recently started using Lilypond and so far it's great. I 
> don't
> think I'm saying anything surprising by observing what seems to 
> be a
> close family resemblance to TeX. Did it start out as TeX macros 
> and
> diverge? 
>
> I wonder if there is a document out there that might talk about 
> the
> design choices made in putting Lilypond together that might 
> compare
> and contrast it with TeX? Lessons learned? 
>
> Thank you,
>
>  -Tom

My opinion is a silly one without any facts or evidence: For 
projects, there might exist a level of 
difficulty-plus-complexity-plus-diversity-plus-peculiarity beyond 
which, *in practice*, every successful solution for that project 
must necessarily be peculiar, difficult, diverse, and complex, and 
the people who complete it will invariably turn out to be diverse, 
complex, difficult, and peculiar.

And: For such a project or its solution or its people, every 
attempt to reduce the overall magnitude of one of those twelve 
characteristics (e.g. complexity of the project, difficulty of the 
solution, etc) will also cause unpredictable increases among the 
other eleven characteristics, unless each of them is correctly 
anticipated and successfully mitigated. And sometimes despite the 
mitigation, too.

Or maybe: Extrapolation works better when it’s applied to one 
graph at a time. :)

--
David R