Re: Imports / inclusion of s.el into Emacs

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: 조성빈 <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sun, 3 May 2020 03:01:03 +0900
>> Cc: Philippe Vaucher <address@hidden>,
>>  Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>,
>>  Richard Stallman <address@hidden>,
>>  address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden
>> 
>> > It sounds very strange to me that the method of learning about strings
>> > is by looking at the list of string-related APIs.
>> 
>> Unless one doesn’t have any programming experience, IMO one can learn
>> (or refresh old memory) of how strings work from the API list.
>
> I doubt that.

Why? If I know what I want to do, but I don't know or remember how stuff is
named organized in an API, I could just fuzzy search, or just look at
completion list and by seeing the names of available stuff I can
guess at which one I want. Unless it is called make-process &
call-process in which case I have to look it up the manual and see what is
which one I want. But if names reflect what stuff does, i.e.
self-documenting code, then by just looking at the list can save some time.

In such context docs like Java docs are not so bad, but context-aware
completion or search like Helm would probably be even better.

> You are mistaken: I'm not such a master.  Like Stefan, I can never
> remember whether its string-multibyte-p or multibyte-string-p.  I use
> the manual and the doc strings all the time because I don't remember
> all those details.  So what I wrote is based on personal experience of
> looking up and finding this information quickly and efficiently.

I try delibarately to remember as little as possible and to search as
much as I can. Not just APIs, but pretty much anything nowdays. There is
so much information around, and everything (in software community) is
developing fast and contionously, so remembering APIs seems as a
waste of energy.