Re: [External] : Re: Setting value 1 when matching two strings

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Monday, October 17, 2022 at 12:42 PM
> From: "Michael Heerdegen" <michael_heerdegen@web.de>
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: [External] : Re: Setting value 1 when matching two strings
>
> Heime <heimeborgia@protonmail.com> writes:
>
> > Have gone through "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" but cannot
> > assimilate all that.
>
> That's good.  Nobody can assimilate that all at once.  You can leave out
> lots of things that are currently not important to you.
>
> > If there was some condensed article about important tools for the
> > elisp programmer, and a crash course on how to use them, that would be
> > very helpful.
>
> Dunno if that's possible.  Depends too much on the background of the
> reader.  And there is a lot of important stuff to know.  I doubt it fits
> in a condensed article, and I doubt even more that you would write good
> programs after reading that.  It would be a trap.  The manual is not
> that long because the authors were bad, it's full of important things.
> If you simplify, no matter where, you'll later regret it.  Waste a lot
> of time, and still have to read all of it.

You are quite correct.  What is needed is a tool that gives you a collection
of possible traverses of the manual for what you need, then goes on organising
them for you, and displays them.  That would be the next emacs breakthrough.

In many of the national labs, people don't bother organising things anymore.
It will take more than a lifetime.  Rather it is automated tools that traverse
through all that.  The problem is that one will miss a lot of things nevertheless.
So it is simply a matter of luck.  Have found very few people willing to take the
time to understand the fundamental parts.

> > What I did was look at the emacs website displaying everything on one
> > web page.  The Gnu Emacs Info Viewer, is that when you type "info" at
> > the shell command line?
>
> The command line program "info" is a reader for the Info documentation
> for the command line.  Emacs has its own integrated and very nice Info
> reader: type C-h i.
>
> Oh, now I see that you only read the introduction, not the Elisp
> reference manual.  I suggest to have a look at that one, too.
>
> Yeah sorry if we sometimes sound rude, but all shortcuts are traps,
> _all_ - sorry.  It's hard to defer what one actually wants to do and
> read that boring stuff instead.  I guess all of us tried some shortcuts.
> We all wasted lots of time more or less.
>
> Michael.