Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Vaidheeswaran C <vaidheeswaran.chinnaraju@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 16 May 2015 01:02 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Again, I think we already do all that in the Emacs manuals, where
> appropriate.

- Emacs Manual :: I am arguing for FSF-blessed, Task-oriented "Emacs
                  Primer".

- 'Appropriate' :: The word "Approrpriate" is situational.  Who
                   decides what is appropriate?  The maintainers, the
                   users or the author of the manual.

In so far as "Emacs Primer" is concerned, the Noobs become
authorities.  If they say something is "inappropriate" (from where
they stand), then it will be deemed as such, without further
disputation.

> But please note the catch in this approach, if used indiscriminately:
> the number of potential "Tasks" that an Emacs user can face is
> virtually infinite.  These tasks break into certain "building blocks",
> which are combined in many different ways.  If you always describe the
> "tasks", then you will need to repeat the description of these
> building blocks time and time again, which is a disadvantage.

The question is: Whose "disadvantage" are you talking about?

> IOW, the above methodology is suitable only to relatively simple tools
> that support a small number of well-defined tasks.  Emacs is not like
> that, especially if you take ELisp into consideration, because that's
> a reasonably general-purpose programming language, where the
> task-based approach is unsuitable, IMO.

In so far as "Emacs Primer" is concerned, Elisp will be out-of-scope.

If "Appropriate" => ""Completeness", then what you say cannot be
disputed.  (See my earlier question on "Appropriateness").  "Emacs
Manual" MAY be considered as a Curriculum but "Emacs Primer" WILL NOT
BE A curriculum.

The cookbooks and recipes are particularly popular and useful
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ElispCookbook.  (This is true in spite
of whether Emacs developers approve of such material or not.)