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Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search


From: Xah Lee
Subject: Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:18:22 -0000
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Jul 10, 4:25 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > 2010-07-10
>
> > On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> >> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> >> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
> >> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
> >> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> >> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> >> and so on.
>
> > that's called progress.
>
> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
> determined, dared, and done.

you mean like this?

• World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics???
  http://xahlee.org/comp/WMSCI.html

and Larry Wall's post-modern stuff? like the following chantable
quote?

“The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
than the difference between theory and practice in practice.”

• Perl: Theory vs Practice
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_practice.html

and “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
Impatience, and Hubris.”, right?

• Larry Wall and Cults
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/larry_wall_n_cults.html

and the unix philosophy KISS right?

• The Nature of the Unix Philosophy
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_phil.html

> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.

so, you are saying, that some non-professionals actually have opinions
or insights that turn out to be more correct than the common theories
of the experts in particular field? I agree, and also agree that
sometimes cherry can be mistaken for banana, and female for male.
Though, what's the point?

My point that you were replying to, was about how tech geekers
ignorantly attribute laziness or stupidity to non-tech-geekers. And my
method used to convey this, is by a analogy, that indicates that
computing tech geekers are in general too idiotic about everything
other than computers. That, when you snear non-techies for their
cluelessness about using emacs or applications, you should look at the
mirror and think about how at this very moment those business people,
lawers, politicians, are laughing at you about how eternally-clueless
you are of basic social matters.

the reason i wrote in such a style and comparison, is due to, a
reaction from the idiotic style widely purveyed by the tech geekers,
as, if you will, a retaliatory refutation, which, mirrors and puts a
dagger right in the heart of matter. Did you enjoy reading it?

> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
> would be shown up as fools.

What about Einstein or Newton or Archimedes? How they fit in?

did you know that your dropping of names is not scholarly smooth? For
example, if you meant to mention what's considered the greatest, then
Godel and Knuth would not be up there. If you want to go by tech
geekers's fashion, then Gauss shouldn't be there.

y'know? we can turn this section to be more fruitful. Alas, whenever i
give it a start in that direction, tech geekers quickly drop out of
discussion, for lack of knowledge when dicussion gets a bit valuable.

For example, let's ask the question, of which we can have mutual
education: Who would be considered the top 20 computer scientist and
or programer? I don't really know the answer at all... but let's take
up the computer scientists case. At best i could maybe come up with 5
names off hand... and if pressed can come up with 10 names, but would
have no idea if the names would be say top 20 or so off that some of
them might be within top 100 instead.

however, this is certainly a valid question albeit non-scientific one.
And for a computer scientist (thousands of people quality), they
easily know the answer. So, let's grok... who among us can give us a
ball park list of people that might be roughly agreed among majority
of computer scientists that are the top 20 in the world in the past
100 years?

ok, let me try to pull off the top of my head as fast as i can type
without thinking or thumbing the web.... ok there's Knuth, and Guy
Steel of Scheme fame might be on it (after-thought: probably not (and
with Guy, there's probably the other 2 Sussman & co who co-write of
the Structure & Interp of Comptuer Programs books)), then Edsger
Dijkstra i think, then i think Haskell Curry (though not sure to what
degree logicians should be counted as computer scientists here), hum
ok probably a number of folks from the functional programing community
would get on the list, Dana Scott or something, and there's the
logician Quin something, and of course there's Turing who is gay and
got forced to eat a poisoned apple; here Alan Turing to tech geekers
is like Britney Spears to teens, every sophomoron knows and loves to
cite (same with Knuth), and with him there's Church... thinking of
this, then my fav author of all times B Russell. With Russell
mentioned, then Whitehead might deserve consideration. Humm, so the
train of thought quickly runs to the idea that the list of possible
names can easily be gotton by thinking with the math subjects of
functional lang's foundations, then grab the associated names of that
field, e.g. lambda calculus, symbolic logic, combinator theory,
recursion theory (recursion theory reminds me of Wolfram and Gospel
and Smullian and a gaggle from Martin Gardner circle
(• Martin Gardner (1914-2010)  http://xahlee.org/math/Martin_Gardner.html
)
), ... and broaden
it we can start to think of names associated with any finite/discrete
math, e.g. game theory, computational geometry, ... with game theory
there's the famous Conway... (and again the Martin circle Penrose,
Hofstadter... Rudy Rucker)

humm, of course there's a bunch of lang inventors, e.g. inventors of
java (gosgling and co), perl (Larry charlatan), python (Guido dummy),
tcl (the John something), c (3 or so major idiots with their “unix
philosophy” fuck ((Dennis co.) one particular i vaguely think is a
fuckface idiot from the unix gang is Rob Pike, with is unix KISS my
ass!)), c++ (bjormine moron), but these dumb asses prob won't even
make it to top 100. With that, i am thinking of all unix protocols and
tech and or before that, e.g. inventors of many networking protocols
e.g. the tcp/ip suite... but again prob i don't think any would make
it to top 20. (oh and there's the Ruby japanese guy M something, and
of course the lisp guy McCarthy i think he might make it to top 20,
then going on we can think about the Fortran, Pascal, Logo lisp,
Cobol, Ada, Basic... guys)

wheew.... my spade of typing is quite impressive! i think given a day
of web checking, i can probably come up with at at least 40 of people
who should be in the top 100.

do we have a working computer scientist here familiar with most field
of comp sci and can quickly give as a list? am sure such topic might
be brought up in computing journals or hist of comp sci books.

> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.

my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.

let me repeat, the “point” is meaningless chant. For example, what you
mean common denominator?? So, Pine, Pico, isn't common denominator?
How about BBEdit? and Linux's GUI Knight and Kate? hum? are they
supposed to be this common denominator?

also, why tech geekers always pull up a word processor to compare
with? What about Apple's X-code, tms's Visual Studio, and Java's
NetBeans and Eclipse? Mathematica's Notebook system? and there also
was Thick C, Code Warrior, etc on the Mac in the 1990s, and speaking
of that, on Windows there's Delphi IDE and quite a few others. Are
these, also idiotic, dumb, a vicious cycle of idiot begetting idiot?
What's a example of a editor that's not a idiotic viscous cycle? is it
vi and emacs?

if any tech geeker has pain in his ass and must mention that proper
IDEs shouldn't be compared to emacs, then there's BBEdit, Notepad++,
Notepad2, Textmate, NEdit, JEdit... quite a few. Are these, then,
belongs to the common denominator reposible for idiocy in society?

does non-idiotic practically mean something crass and
incomprehensible? So, unix, C++, and speghetti mudball are good,
right? Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, are kid's fuck that damage
society and idiot generating crap, right?

are the world's top 100 programers, am sure 95% of them don't use
emacs and will adamantly refuse to, are they, considered as idiots?
that they are too dumb to sit down and consume a beautiful manual as
emacs?

> > (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
> > being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
> > Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
> > personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
> > personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
> > logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
> > experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
> > done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
> > besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
> > On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
> > circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
> > Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
> > the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
> > be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
> > (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )
>
> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.

well the characters i had in mind are... the top 2 that portrait the
gist is of course Mr Spock and Mr Data. Then, there's Dr Lectur in
Silence of the Lamb, e.g. who can do things that threatens his life
without raising a heartbeat,... there are many many such chars in
films, i think i can easily list 20 off hand in 10 min but requires
too much typing and description... from psycho freaks to actors who
pull great heists to womanizers, liers... etc. The key is that these
mostly fictional characters has the ability to perform a action
without any emotional baggage that normal human beings have (fear,
anxiety, nervousness, cold heartedness... so on), and to various
degrees. (007 for example, usually have chars that fits such
description too ...)... serial killers, serial marriage money
grabbers, ...

> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
> question of who will evaluate the measurer.

when you measure, say, a dick, once the rules and methods are agree
upon, the question of the measurer isn't a question. Because, that can
be easily resolved in many ways.

> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...

hum? what is your point?  that i am wrong? that i might be wrong?  or,
are you indicating in anyway which side of argument you are on?? Or,
is the whole point being that i should reconsider?? If so, what are
the reasons?

Thanks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

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