Re: Org, Hyperbole, and eev

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Sun, 26 Jun 2022 at 13:29, Robert Weiner <rsw@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi Eduardo:
>
> I really think that you are confused in saying that Hyperbole and Org are 
> hacker-unfriendly.  Yes, they are targeted at users who don't have to 
> understand the programming, but if you do understand Lisp programming well, 
> the interactive features are available as Lisp functions in almost all cases, 
> so you simply have to dive in, find the functions you want and utilize or 
> change them.
>
> In fact, Hyperbole offers 'action implicit buttons' that utilize 
> angle-bracket syntax to turn any Lisp function (or hyperbole button type call 
> or variable reference) into a hyperbutton that runs the function with 
> arguments or displays the variable, e.g.  <find-file 
> "~/.org/my-org-file.org">.
>
> With Hyperbole, much of the behavior is factored into class-like libraries 
> with the 'methods' alphabetized and separated into public and private 
> groupings.  Now some of this code is complex in order to handle many contexts 
> and make things simple to the user but that is a matter of you understanding 
> this complexity if you want to hack on it.
>
> I'm not sure what else you could ask for in packages.


Hi Robert,

let me see if I can find something useful to say...

Most of the people that I know who became active users of eev were
"beginner programmers" when they started using eev - by "beginner
programmers" I mean that their mental buffers were still quite small,
and they couldn't understand well functions that were more than a few
lines long. I wanted to make eev more accessible to people like them,
and I treated their feedback very seriously.

One of the techniques that I used to make eev more accessible to them
is described in this video,

  http://angg.twu.net/find-elisp-intro.html
  (find-1stclassvideo-links "2022findelispintro")
  (find-2022findelispintrovideo "14:36")

from 14:36 onwards - "put several similar examples close to one
another, starting by the most basic ones".

I treated that technique as "obvious" for many years - I just used it
in many places, and I thought that the users would notice that
pattern, and start to use it in their own notes. That didn't work, and
I saw that I had to spell out that technique explicitly, and repeat it
often.

When I asked you questions about how to create eev-style sexps that
would behave as hyperbole-style buttons, in some of the e-mails that I
point to here,

  http://angg.twu.net/hyperbole.html

I was signaling that my mental buffers were almost full... at that
point explanations in English helped me very little, and I was trying
to write "several similar examples close to one another, starting by
the most basic ones" to factor your code conceptually via tests.

I _still_ think that your buttons and menus are hacker-unfriendly. The
source code is available, yes, but I spent several evenings trying to
understand them in my "non-user" way, and I got a mental buffer
overflow instead of enlightenment... and I also spent many hours
writing e-mails to the Hyperbole mailing list, but the answers left me
very frustrated.

  Hope that helps, =/
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/#eev