> Hopefully we will quickly take care of your remarks. I really can't benefit from pida until I know more, so I'd like to help you help me.
First, though, here are several principles that help me write documentation. 1. Compression. My brother, Speed Ream, told me about this one. I suspect most of us follow this principle without knowing about it, but it helps to make the principle explicit. Compression means doing two or more things at the same time. For example, Speed will delay going to the hardware store until he has several items on the list. Compression also means getting multiple benefits from the same work. For documentation, it means finding ways to do pre-writing automatically. For example, when I do any Leo project (say fixing a bug or adding a new feature), I create a project node and put all the notes for that project in the node. Later, when it's time to write the release notes for a new release, I copy all the project notes and revise them. So the project notes become pre-writing for the release notes. 2. FAQ's are easy writing. FAQ's are easy for several reasons. First, the conversational style seems to be easy for almost everyone. Second, organizational issues disappear: you are just answering one question at a time. Later, you can arrange the answers in some logical manner, but that doesn't affect the actual writing. Without further ado, here are the questions I need answered in order to understand and use pida. My expectation is that the answers you give here will become the basis (pre-writing) for the new pida docs. I'll write them in no particular order. Why should I be interested in pida? That is, pida looks like many other ide's. Why shouldn't I just use some other ide? What kinds of programs can I embed in pida? Can I embed any program? Besides Emacs, what other editors can I embed? Can I embed vim? What makes a program embeddable? Could I embed Leo? Exactly how does embedding work? What code would I write (in pida) to make embedding happen? If there is a clever or difficult pida module that does the 'heavy lifting', what is it? And how would I use it? Can I change the look and feel of pida? Could I change the screen organization? If so, how? Could I add a minibuffer to pida? If so, how? Is there technology in pida that Leo could use without using all of pida? If so, what is it? Ali mentioned that pida sends elisp messages to Emacs. Very cool. Isn't this the reverse of what pymacs does? If so, it may be exactly what I need. In any event, exactly how does the message passing work? All details would be most welcome. Is there technology to have different parts run in different processes? If so, this would be very cool. Can you tell me more? How does it work? How do I use it? Are there any limitations? Plugins. I'm totally at a loss. The outer docs say that it's easy to add plugins. How do I do this? Can you give example code? Are plugins an important part of the pida philosophy? If so, how do they fit in? In general, is there anything else I should know about pida? Any code or technique you are particularly proud of? Anything else that is particular clever? Anything else that might be useful to other developers? Details! Can you tell me more about how to understand pida? Anything more about how to use pida? What about future directions? Plans for nifty new features? Finally, I am reminded of the two questions from Tom Wolf's book 'The Right Stuff' about test pilots. The only questions the hot shot would ask before flying a plane was 'How do I start this thing?' and 'Anything else I should know?' HTH Edward P.S. It took me about 10 minutes to write these questions. I'll let you know when if I think of some more :-) Please feel free to answer question in any order. Finally, I would not have given pida much thought, but I knew Ali's superb debugger work, so I knew there was probably something good in pida. If you answer these questions a lot more people will be able to recognize the good work you have done. EKR --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PIDA" group. To post to this group, send email to pida@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pida?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
