Re: Making scripts with sawfish-client

[Timo Korvola iki fi]

Geoff Kuenning <geoff cs hmc edu> writes:
> I don't think it's particularly inviting to outsiders if we get
> defensive about perfectly reasonable questions and criticisms.

Perhaps not, although it seems to me that the original poster's use
case is rather non-typical, which would explain the absence of
directly applicable documentation.

> But the stuff in librep is discussed only in documentation strings.

There is a separate texinfo manual for librep.

> That brings up the classic elisp problem: doc strings tend to be
> terse,

Particularly doc strings of defcustoms, which have been intentionally
kept terse because they are also used to create the customization GUI.
There should probably be a short and long description but alas, there
isn't.  Emacs solves this by using only the first sentence of the doc
string when a short description is needed.  Another alternative would
be to use separate strings.  There is also the issue of translation: I
am not sure how it should be done.

> and you often can't even find out that a function exists
> unless you already have a good guess as to its name.

A version of "apropos" that searches doc strings might help.  The
texinfo manuals are also searchable of course.

> How successful do you think Python would be if there was nothing
> except a brief listing of library functions with 2-line
> descriptions?

Apples and oranges.  It would be more interesting to compare with the
popularity of PYWM and Kahakai.

-- 
	Timo Korvola		<URL:http://www.iki.fi/tkorvola>