Re: Thoughts on weaving variable documentation

[Fabrice Niessen <fni-news-TA4HMoP+1wHrZ44/DZwexQ@public.gmane.org>]

Hello Grant,

> A lot of people are weaving their Emacs init files for the obvious
> reason: it is difficult to remember why
> we configured stuff and other people definitely won't know why we did
> it. There is a common operation
> that occurs though when other people read our Emacs init:
>
> 1. They open it up in Emacs
> 2. Find what looks interesting
> 3. Do a C-h f or C-h v on it and learn about it
>
> Makes total sense.
>
> What I got curious about is for this specific use case, people
> scanning other people's configs, how I could make it easier.

Remember the following quote of Knuth:

  ╭────
  │ Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of
  │ programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct
  │ a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to
  │ human beings what we want a computer to do.
  │ 
  │ The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an
  │ essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of
  │ style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of
  │ variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she
  │ strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts
  │ have been introduced in an order that is best for human
  │ understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that
  │ reinforce each other.
  ╰────

Hence, for me, people scanning your config should read the document that
you've made therefore (that is, the weaved document), not the file
that's made for a computer (that is, the tangle document).

If there are parts you don't want others to see, tag them as
":noexport:" or similar more subtle ways.

As a guy convinced by LP, I wouldn't invest much time into facilitating
the reading of the tangled file; I would, on the opposite, invest a lot
of time (and I did -- results will be public soon on my Web site and on
GitHub!) on the weaved document, by improving CSS for the HTML version
and LaTeX styles.

> A thought is to weave the docstrings for variables right into the
> weaved file any time a variable is set. I am thinking something like
> this:
>
> 1. When the weave occurs
> 2. Look at each line of code that starts with a setq
> 3. Look up the docstring for the variable
> 4. TBD: Weave that documentation into the output.
>
> That is the idea, at least.
>
> My question is:
> 1. What are the standard mechanisms to do something like this within
> the ob lifecycle?
> 2. What do you think in general?

Best regards,
Fabrice

-- 
Fabrice Niessen
Leuven, Belgium
http://www.pirilampo.org/