Re: HOWTO: Cowtow to old farts

[Xah Lee]

for those who may not know, Ilya Zakharevich is the guy to perl's
regex engine, and author of cperl-mode. (8.1 k non-comment lines.),
among tens of other perl modules.

On Jun 29, 1:04 am, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org> wrote:
> Re: HOWTO: Cowtow to old farts
> ...
> So, what do you think?

I think you are joking. lol.

am curious, what are your emacs configs? are they public somewhere? I
didn't seem to see it in your perl home page. Thanks in advance.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

On Jun 29, 1:04 am, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org> wrote:
> On 2010-06-10, Evans Winner <tho...@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> > In my opinion, the question should never be what new users
> > of Emacs want.  What new users want is an editor that is 5%
> > better than notepad.exe because that is per-force the limit
> > of their imagination.  They generally do no know 1% of what
> > Emacs can do, so are not in a position to intelligently
> > decide what the defaults should be.  They /should/ want to
> > rely on experienced users for that, and they should be
> > willing to spend the extra tiny bit of effort up-front to
> > learn the reasoning behind it.  If they aren't, then Emacs
> > isn't for them.  Let them go.
>
> Do not think you would find many people agreeing with you.  Anyway:
>
> =======================================================
>
> I applaud the stand of emacs developers in this thread: facing with
> (extremely rude, unsubstantiated and, IMO, just plain stupid) attacks from
> a handful of self-righteous ... - Well, there is no need to stack epithets
> here, if you read this, you probably have read the other 176 messages in
> this thread, and had a possibility to see what the attackers consider to be
> "arguments".
>
> Anyway, I'm really proud of how the developers behaved in this situation -
> and how they understand their responsibilities in maintaining Emacs.  Myself,
> I never used Emacs23, so cannot comment on the particular feature in question;
> however, I cannot skip commenting on the general question of maintainance of
> Emacs defaults.  (In 1/2 of what follows, there is going to be nothing new
> w.r.t. my other runts on this topic; skip to '----' if you cannot stand this
> habit of mine.)
>
> For several decades, Emacs was practically unusable as a text editor AS
> SHIPPED.  Mostly, this was due to the old-guard developers having no clue
> in questions of UI design.  The situation started to change about 10 years
> ago (and now I expect I may be able to remove more than half of those
> MEGABYTES of customizations I needed to make Emacs bearable for me - and many
> people using my customizations).  I attribute it to inflow of new blood the
> camp of developers - and, as I said, I'm proud of them having great
> contributions to this thread.
>
> Being "unusable-as-shipped" makes the question of preserving the old defaults
> moot - the ONLY way ahead is to change the defaults as quick as possible.
> This would make the `hidden wonders' of Emacs accessible to most of the users.
>
> In my experience (and let me stress that this thread proves me wrong - see
> below), Emacs users come in two large categories: the silent majority (>70%,
> in my estimates): the people who operate in n00b's mode (as in "how do I edit
> .emacs if it is not there?" [*] ;-): they know better use of their brains
> than learning hundreds of keyboard command, learning how to program Emacs,
> and/or what is the name of configuration file of Emacs.
>
>  (In my experience, most users also share another feature: most of them are
>   not interested in "typing as quick as they think".  They are more
>   interested in following the "when you say what you think, think what you
>   say" maxim.  Quality [and prudence] over speed...  Few of they would be
>   interested in "minimizing leaving home row keys".)
>
> The other category consists of us, old guard old farts, who consider it an
> investement of time to read the NEWS file (at least when things break ;-),
> who are visible on c.e.emacs, are not intimidated by running `F1 k' if things
> are not working as we expect, and for whom it is absolutely not a nuisance
> to insert a line into .emacs once in several years.
>
> Facing these two categories, the policy is obvious: the default should cater
> to those who won't be able to change them: newbies and eternal-newbies.
> And for the old farts, there should be a clear pathway to navigate to HOWTO
> on undoing these changes.  (And: this thread contained many suggestions how
> to make this navigation easier.)
>
> ----  And now the new part  ----
>
> However, as this thread shows, there is another category which was
> overlooked in my list (in my 15 years on this newsgroup, I do not recollect
> hearing from it before): "hapless" old farts - those who have a pretty good
> idea how Emacs works, but do not know how to find their way out of their
> pants^H^H^H^Hroblems.
>
> In this thread, their rudeness and obvious haplessness in the skill of
> persuation hides an important consideration: it is POSSIBLE AND EASY to cater
> to their needs as well.  And if it is possible and easy, I think ti is our
> obligation to implement it.
>
> The solution may be as easy as having one function and one variable.  Use them
> by replacing the defaults value by
>
>   (choose-by-version
>     emacs-principal-UI-freeze
>     nil
>     "23.2" t
>     "21.1" 'skip)
>
> with arguments being VERSION DEFAULT_VAL VERSION1 VALUE1 VERSION2 VALUE2 ....
> One may require VERSIONn's going in decreasing order, so nil, t, 'skip
> would be the "current default", "previous default", "default before this" etc.
>
> Even if there is only a handful of people who would actually want to freeze
> the "principal parts" of UI, such a trick may have a major role.  Just a
> POSSIBILITY to freeze allows one much more freedom in CHANGING the defaults.
> And I expect that there may be many more useful ways to make defaults yet more
> user-friendly than they are now.
>
> So, what do you think?
> Ilya
>
> [*]  BTW: why not have an option "Edit configuration file" in the Help menu?
>      Or maybe it is already there?  Not here, in 21.4...
>
>      One may even insert some meaningful header there if the file is
>      not present (sp?):
>
>          ;;; This file is loaded by Emacs before-this/after-that;
>          ;;; it should contain Emacs-Lisp code customizing Emacs to your 
> taste.
>          ;;; To debug problems in this file, one may skip loading it
>          ;;; by giving option -q to emacs.  Alternatively, uncomment
>          ;;; the following line (or give --debug-init option to Emacs):
>          ; (....)
>          ;;; For further details, Choose XYZT from Emacs menu, or type ....