41–50 of 88 posts
Off topic but … > Most people have heard of files and documents in real life I don’t think so. I’m late 30s and I learned of files and folders on windows long before I was introduced to the physical concept. I still feel a small tickle in my funny bone when I see a real life version of the folder icon in an office.
as you can see ive lost a case. have you seen my upper case by chance?
“Buffer” is just as bad or good a name as “file” or “document”. Files and documents can be in-memory and temporary, and the primary purpose of an Emacs buffer arguably isn’t buffering.
Off topic but … > Most people have heard of files and documents in real life I don’t think so. I’m late 30s and I learned of files and folders on windows long before I was introduced to the physical concept. I still feel a small tickle in my funny bone when I see a real life version of the folder icon in an office.
I'd venture to guess everyone here knows what YouTube is even if they never use it. I wonder how many (even on this list) have seen a CRT? (I'm guessing the answer is "more than I think...")
How do I know what it looks like to press a wax seal with a ring? Or send a message with a telegraph, or climb the rigging of a square-rigged ship?
I know there are people who carefully avoid any media that isn't obviously by and about the present moment, and they'll continue to be clueless about the past like they always have been, but there will also be plenty of people who can identify a CRT into the 22nd century.
“Buffer” is just as bad or good a name as “file” or “document”. Files and documents can be in-memory and temporary, and the primary purpose of an Emacs buffer arguably isn’t buffering.
In the most general sense, “Document” is a better name, because more people understand what a document is than understand what a “buffer” is.
You can have buffers that are views of many different things: directories, shells, REPLs, email boxes, etc. People might not know what a buffer is, but I think they'd be surprised to see those "in" a document, which might be worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen the little 3d-printed versions of the “save” icon? Some people call them “floppy disks” for unknown reasons. :)
Funny how there’s two levels of obsolescence here: I’ve used plenty of floppies, but none of them were actually floppy ; I’ve had 8-inch floppies waved at me but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a powered-on 8-inch drive. (Yes, I’ve heard the nuclear launch story.)
The C source for Emacs buffer: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/buffer...
A wasted an opportunity to implement it using 7 or 8 microservices.
Off topic but … > Most people have heard of files and documents in real life I don’t think so. I’m late 30s and I learned of files and folders on windows long before I was introduced to the physical concept. I still feel a small tickle in my funny bone when I see a real life version of the folder icon in an office.
The C source for Emacs buffer: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/buffer...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how there’s two levels of obsolescence here: I’ve used plenty of floppies, but none of them were actually floppy ; I’ve had 8-inch floppies waved at me but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a powered-on 8-inch drive. (Yes, I’ve heard the nuclear launch story.)
I only used 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppy disks, and I assume you refer to the 3 1/2 ones as the cover on those was hard. I always thought the 'floppy' part was to refer to the disk itself, which, even on the 3 1/2 ones was flexible, but now you make me question that and perhaps they name just stuck even if they stopped being floppy? I never thought of this because in my country they were referred to as "diskettes" , a word…