Re: Imports / inclusion of s.el into Emacs

[João Távora]

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:02 PM Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> >> 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.
>
> While it doesn't hold for all kinds of data types (where you may have
> to read a bit more of the doc to understand it all), I do expect this to
> be true for strings.

Depends where which language you're coming from. C strings
are quite different than other languages.

I think that unfortunately, people expect to be able to learn a
language on the fly from little snippets, say, the way we all
"learned" to code really bad javascript.  I think Emacs's manual
is a useful tug in the other direction.  Those "large blocks of
text" that someone complained about, are exactly what makes
it good, it tries to give context, to hold your hand.  Of course
everyone likes the feeling of impatiently "learning" a language by
autocomplete of object methods. They expect to type "foo"<dot>
and lo, here are the methods of a string. But in Lisp, function
is king, so that doesn't work. I suppose whoever designed elisp
or its ancestors didn't want to type  "string-" all the time, a good
decision IMO. That person probably didn't have internet and
read a great deal more manuals.

João