RE: docstrings and elisp reference

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> And a lot of care and time has been spent, including
> by some of the most qualified and knowledgable Emacs
> developers, getting it right, where "right" means
> paying attention to the differences among the roles
> of doc string, Emacs manual, and Elisp manual.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that those who have long held a high
> priority for the quality of Emacs doc, including in
> particular RMS and Eli, do not share a reductive,
> JavaDoc-like view of it.  I can't speak for them, of
> course.  Perhaps they will care to speak up; perhaps not.

I see they've both done that now.  Those who have not
yet spent a long time concerned about doc would do
well to listen.

Doc, like helping users generally, and like lots of
other things, is not so trivial.  There is no silver
bullet or royal road to helpful doc.

Emacs deserves the best doc possible.  You might say
it's been lucky that it's always benefitted from
strong developers who are also very concerned about
doc.  But it's not luck.  Quality doc is in part what
Emacs is about.  If you're interested in Emacs then
you pretty much need to be also interested in doc/help.

UI development is, in principle, similar, especially
free-software dev.