Re: Auto Fill Comments

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Friday, November 27, 2020 at 8:03 PM
> From: "Arthur Miller" <arthur.miller@live.com>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Auto Fill Comments
>
> Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> writes:
>
> > My experience has been that as I got to do more things in emacs lisp,
> > the understanding needed quickly exceeded my rate of learning.
> > One can get to sophisticated constructs, even when trying to do
> > relatively simple things.  You never know where your original
> > plan could get you. Many times the importance of a work is not
> > measured by its consequences (i.e. by the final command).
> That is probably because you try to do more difficult things then
> before.
>
> I have been using Emacs for like almost 20 years, and was enough with
> setq-ing few variables, and wrapping ocassional few lines in a defun to
> put it on a hook.

I used to argue that code must be adequately commented.  Later on I realised
that adequacy is determined by the skill of the reader.  Currently I advocate
that code comments are to give an overview of the code to help you reduce
the downtime required to work on the code after a time of inactivity.

Documentation, however, is to be structured according to different levels
of sophistication.  But I understand it could be a lot of work to complete.
Was not my intention to deride anyone. but to describe how it is.  Documentation
is always better than no documentation.  And everyone does as one can.

> Then when I tried to do something more advanced, I realized I was
> hitting a wall and that my knowledge was too lacking; I didn't even know
> how to read and parse a file with Elisp one year ago; and I wrote a toy
> compiler 20 years ago.
>
> I never needed to learn Lisp, and I knew there are probably lots of
> idiomatic things I need to before I can do anything interesting with
> it.
>
> It is just to accept what we don't know; and I realized I would
> need a time to learn it. Thinking that one can just look up all relevant
> things in instant is a misstake. Becomming fluent with ani API and
> programming language takes time. Lisp, PHP and TCL are ones that I found
> easiest to learn, yet it takes lot of time to learn all the APIs, how
> they are used, all the fine details etc.
>
>