PMW vs Lilypond

A few days ago, I discovered From Punched Cards To Flat Screens, the "technical memoirs" of Philip Hazel (of exim and PCRE fame). This document, by itself a very good read, mentioned something about him having written a piece of software for the Acorn RISC OS platform, starting in the early 90s, to typeset music based on a text file; very much the way in which lilypond operates. The document also mentioned that after the demise of Acorn's platform, Philip had ported that application, PMW, to the unix platform. Being interested in music, this had me curious, so I did a bit of investigation.

Lilypond is an interesting piece of software, but as I've written before, I do have a few gripes with it. Once you get beyond the basics, the lilypond syntaxis is somewhat counter-intuitive in my opinion, and there are a number of things that are just wrong with it. Upon reading through the first few examples, I quickly learned that most of the major issues that I have with lilypond's syntaxis simply do not exist with PMW, and that it also has quite a number of features which lilypond in its (in the mean time) fairly long history, still does not support. And while lilypond does have a slightly higher amount of output options, that simply does not weigh against the much higher processing speed and much more sensible input syntaxis of PMW.

I've made a short comparison of the two, which shows some of their differences, and contains some notes on my opinion of the two. This table may grow in the future...

I've only been playing with PMW for a few days now, but I've already decided that I'm going to ditch Lilypond.