Joseph Wakeling wrote:
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. See for example,
http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
You know, I was going to suggest that if one were to take up
programming, one
might benefit from looking into some of the principles of generative
grammar that
came out of MIT in the late 1950's (Chomsky et al). I'm thinking of
recursion;
recursion is now considered by some (Chomsky, Fitch and Hauser, in a
2002 paper
in Science) to be the only truly unique feature of the human language
faculty. At any rate,
I see from the excellent link above [thanks for that!] that Lisp was
developed around
the same time. Concidence? I wonder.
I digress. What I meant to suggest was that since recursion is central
to programming, it
might be worth the effort to have a look at how it is used in human
languages in general,
since every would-be programmer is already a master of recursion in his
own native
tongue; a grasp of the recursion in human language might make it a
little easier to transter
the knpwledge over to programming lanuages.
I'm writing in haste - does any of the above make sense?
Cheers,
Mike
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user