Re: Org, Hyperbole, and eev

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com>]

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