how to get started with premiere scripting?

[hyuvii]

Hi. I'm an experienced web developer who's working on a project which requires some scripting in Premiere Pro.

My needs aren't highly complicated, and at first I thought "well this looks fine" seeing the CEP samples on github. Never have I have ever seen such bad bad horrible job of creating an API since trying to work with Microsoft's Outlook. There seems to be no manual or proper documentation for Premiere, furthermore, most (if not all? I didn't check) of the links on the github page are dead. Worse, some of the links are supposed to point at a file within that project - upon finding that file (in a different place) it turns out that even the intended lines the link points to are out of date.The official ESTK install links on Adobe's website are dead too, I only finally got it through the Creative Cloud - after enabling "show older apps" of course, which hasn't been a whole lot of help because it's debugging system is so ridiculously out of date. Oh also, some of the examples on github don't even run *as is*. There's no proper guide or quick-start tool, there's not even something like a REPL system that'll allow you to mess around and learn through that.

I need to run some really simple operations. I'm not asking for help with figuring out how to do them - I can do that on my own, provided I have some system that allows me to actually understand and learn without banging my head against the wall. Frankly, this is embarrassing and unprofessional from a company this big, and I don't understand it, but maybe someone on this community can point me in the right direction? I just need a way to start messing with this so I can actually learn how to use it.

[hyuvii]

You don't have any idea about my personality, I was making it into a joke but you replied seriously so let me reply in kind.

I worked very hard on something and it took a long time to construct and build, I thought the hard part was over when I found out how difficult it is to work with premiere. I spent hours looking for documentation or any information. I had to run every basic functionality through tests again and again with no way of knowing how many arguments each gets, what it returns, or what are my options. There was no logging system or REPL system to make that process easier. And all that for the sake of something that shoulda been really really basic. Maybe to someone who's familiar with this it's easy to find the examples needed, but for me every function is a complete mystery because there's literally no information. Take for example creating a new sequence - while I can easily find two functions in PProPanel I have no idea about them - are there more similar functions? Can I pass other arguments? Do they return the sequence or not? Even now, after figuring out how to use them, I still have no idea what's QE and why I needed to enableQE. I'm not short tempered and you won't hear me complain about having to take time to figure out a system slowly, as long as I have some basic tools to figure it out on my own. And here it felt like everything was a hurdle, every learning technique I know wasnt applicable.

I say my opinions as they are, when I see something I consider bad I call it like it is. I think that's more respectful then pretending it isn't and playing nice.

[JapinderSandhu]

question 1. is there any way to get the preset path of any sequence? for example a function like

"getSequencePresetPath(sequenceID)" 

returns string path of sequence preset? 

question 2. where can I find the already created sequence presets that are in Premiere pro? How do I dynamically show those paths ?

[hyuvii]

Also, is there a logging system of some kind? I mean, something akin to ​console.log(somestring)​. I'm using alerts right now to test results and that's a terrible method.

[hyuvii]

Here's an answer I gave someone who asked about Django on StackOverflow. Notice how I'm giving him various examples that do very simple straightforward tasks and have really simple results. That's what I need. That's all I need, really.