>> Over the years, I've become extremely wary of syntactic sugar: it >> adds an extra barrier to usage/development because everyone not >> only has to learn Scheme, they also have to learn the (lilypond >> specific) idioms involved. > > I'm curious you say that, since my experience is precisely the > opposite: I've had far better results "selling" Lilypond to people > using syntactic sugar than basically anything else I can > identify. The people I’ve "converted" all want to be able to type > things like > > \reverseMusic \foo > > rather than learning how to write the equivalent function in > Scheme. In other words, syntactic sugar keeps them from learning > Scheme as opposed to having to learn it. > > Am I missing something? Is my experience unique?
No, your experience is not unique. I think that developers and normal users (but probably not Scheme wizards) have rather diametral views on this topic. Werner