For those who don't know, Hendershott wrote Cakewalk, the most popular music-creation software on the PC. He knows his stuff. It's also an engaging article, esp for us old C/C++ hacks who get nervous around Lispy things.
I saw Greg give a nice talk at Racket Con this year. He was really humble and talked about the challenges of writing a Markdown parser. Didn't know he wrote Cakewalk! Cool!
Don't forget that Cakewalk includes CAL - the Cakewalk Application Language, which is a bit Lisp'y, I have to say, as well as being a bit C'ish, to boot. ;)
Confession: I used s-expressions only because even I could figure out how to parse that. I didn't appreciate Lisp in any meaningful sense.
Fast forward to a few years ago. I wanted to learn a lisp, finally. I gravitated toward Scheme. PLT Scheme seemed like the best choice. Today it's known as Racket.
I remember putting Cakewalk through its paces in the late 80's/early 90's on my old DOS machine in the studio .. it was really a great way to get a lot of music written, and I really appreciate your aesthetics for how you managed that application over time - the arrival of CAL was a really interesting move, and as things moved so fast in the pro audio world in the 90's, it always sort of bothered me that more and more tools were not written with scripting - for the user - in mind.
My friends and I wrote all sorts of CAL scripts to 'funkify' our Drum/Rythmn tracks - I wish I still had a copy of funkify.cal around, it'd be nice to see it again.
I moved on from Cakewalk around the DOS/Windows migration, as I've never been a heavy fan of Windows, nor a real user, so I got set up with all kinds of other tools after we left the DOS machines alone .. mostly hardware sequencers.
What do you think about one day doing a hardware sequencer, Greg? With the way things are going, it seems like you could return to the world of music-composition, albeit with a hardware bent, and make some serious progress in that department .. as we know the music industry/market is heavily cyclic, soon enough there will be a return to hardware as a reliable, dependent way of composing music. Any plans in that regard? Imagine: a hardware MIDI/Audio sequencer .. with onboard SCRIPTING! :)
