Re: How users start programming in Emacs Lisp...

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sat, 29 May 2021 at 23:12, Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2021 at 10:37 AM
>> > From: "Jean Louis" <bugs@gnu.support>
>> > To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
>> > Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> > Subject: How users start programming in Emacs Lisp...
>> >
>> > (...)
>> >
>> > *scratch* buffer is famous for it.
>> >
>> > I just need more of them but *scratch*, so I do it this way:
>
>
> Hi, just a curiosity...
>
> why do you prefer to use scratch buffers for elisp code instead of
> using (semi-scratch?) files in which we record all our experiments?
>
> In the tutorials of eev I try to convince the new users to treat their
> notes and scratch code as "field notes", and save everything they
> can... one of my arguments is this:
>
>   Learning eev is also like learning to use paper notebooks. It is
>   much easier to understand the notes and ideas what we wrote
>   ourselves in our notebooks than to understand what other people
>   wrote in their notebooks... when we go back to what _we_ wrote we
>   are able to reconnect with what we were thinking, even when our
>   notes are quite terse because we did not write down all details -
>   and we can't do that with other people's notes.

I think you are probably correct about saving notes. Some vary famious
scientists attribute almost everything to their notes. Maybe a
self-saving scratch buffer isn't bad idea. It could maybe append a date
and always open "fresh" but the true file would be save in the
background, as a sort of a database. Sort of like we clear the terminal
screen with Ctrl+l but the output is still there, just not
visible. There probably is some note-taking package that already does
that. Maybe some org-capture template that auto puts note in a lisp src
block. Or maybe your eev already does that. Still didn't try it. It
seems so conceptually big to me so I never get to it. Similar as that
other package Hyperbole.