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
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