Simple---because with VB and/or AppleScript you are tying yourself to one platform, or at any rate biasing yourself heavily.
Ah... I look at that as a different problem than "communicating with others". I didn't think we were talking about portability. I think that when you start talking about cross-platform portability, the core language isn't as important as the graphics library is...
Additionally, there's the question of what you want to do. If you want to learn *programming*, I think VB is considered a bad environment.
Heck, LOTS of things have been considered bad. Isn't there a famous article somewhere titled something to the effect of "C Shell Programming Considered Harmful"? Ah yes, here it is: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ Heehee... And I know plenty of people who still write csh scripts... (And isn't VB still the most used programming language in the world?)
All the more reason to make sure that when you learn, you learn to *program*, not to be trapped by one language, one platform or one implementation.
Agreed. Different languages for different problem sets...
Your beginning language should therefore be something that opens your horizons instead of restricting them.
Well, here's where I disagree, if only in the sense that some languages have such open horizons that a beginning programmer could be overwhelmed... That's where "bad environments" like VB and AppleScript can help. :)
I think the earlier poster who suggested going straight for Scheme may have a point. Not only is it the core language for working with Lilypond, but it's a Lisp dialect, and Lisp is both the grandaddy of programming and the most flexible language there is.
Were you around when Stallman was trying to push Scheme as the one true GNU scripting language? (As for "flexible", how about we define the problem set first?) :) Doug _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user