Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Kevin Montuori]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013, at 17:55, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse) writes:
> 
> > I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many
> > people are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely
> > self-documenting, not just through the Info manuals but also
> > from the dynamically generated documentation from Elisp programs
> > themselves.
> 
> I've heard that Emacs is self-documenting numerous times, and, if
> this refers to the docstrings of Elisp functions, I have to say
> "self-documenting" is stretching the truth. 

I always took self documenting to mean that what documentation there is
(and there's a lot of it!) is installed with the application.  There
seems to be a trend of documentation wikis or online-only docs (the
otherwise very useful Ansible project is a recent example) where you
can't trivially download it all or print it easily (or search it with
your own tools).  Hell ... a beginner can learn to program ("An
Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp") from the included info docs. 

None of that diminishes how useful having comments associated with funs
and vars is -- I find the unit level documentation excellent and handy
when I'm hacking up advice or a fun (or a new mode).  

That said: the blogs, wikis, and documentation that's available
elsewhere are great supplementary material.  I'd still be mired in
org-mode docs without some nifty examples on the web.  (Bill Clemenson's
notes about slime also come to mind -- I'm really in debt to the folks
who take the time to expound.) 

k.

-- 
  Kevin Montuori
  montuori@gmail.com