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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

chrisdone.com

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Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#21

Post by riffraff »

belorn wrote: post #17
etfb wrote: post #8

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smu…

> attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smug, self-absorbed and utterly without empathy. I think you have just described the normal IRC experience for any software project in existence. IRC just tend to breed cliques and inside jokes, and the most common form of reply I have ever gotten while looking for help is "check the source code". Never mind that its a few thousands line of l…

I think you are exxagerating, some places tend to become like that and some don't.

I found the python, ruby and perl channels very nice when I was learning the languages a decade ago or so, and by my occasional lurking they still seem to be.

Recently I was on #elm on freenode and it also was a nice place.

Cliques and inside jokes obviously are part of what a community _is_ but that doesn't necessarily translate to smugness and lack of empathy.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#22

Post by kabdib »

etfb wrote: post #14
FatalBaboon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably tried to make a common point: do not give the solution. For a given specific issue, the most you should give is pointers. For the function that solves your problem saves the day but knowing how to find any when needed solves a lifetime of problems. Pointers help to put you on the right track so you're not discouraged.

A cynic's TL;DR: Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. And if you really hate the man, get RMS to design him a fishing rod.

Build a man a fire, he's warm for an evening. Set a man on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life. :-)

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#23

Post by jordigh »

etfb wrote: post #12
FatalBaboon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably tried to make a common point: do not give the solution. For a given specific issue, the most you should give is pointers. For the function that solves your problem saves the day but knowing how to find any when needed solves a lifetime of problems. Pointers help to put you on the right track so you're not discouraged.

I was asking all the right questions -- is this possible, what hooks should I consider, what should I take into account to make sure that the stuff I add doesn't stamp all over other stuff. I'm a programmer with thirty years experience and twenty years with Emacs; I know this stuff. Basically, they shut me down. The thing I was asking was contrary to the whole philosophy of Emacs. I had, they assured me, no right to…

I'm an #emacs regular. Were you the one asking about the mouse in Emacs?

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#24

Post by davexunit »

etfb wrote: post #8

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smu…

You sure seem bitter about something. Every time I've visited #emacs for help I have left with my problems resolved.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#25

Post by leephillips »

stiff wrote: post #19

In common understanding of emacs, its use of lisp recieves perhaps too much attention, while its overall wonderful architecture is underappreciated. Emacs isnt just an editor with embedded lisp, its more a vm for bootstrapping editors. You could do an emacs with python, but the hard part is providing an environment where the extensions dont interfere with the user input loop, with buffer redisplay etc., while still s…

"The emacs buffer-based async handling of external processes is a masterpiece of software engineering, much better than things like unix pipes."

This sounds intriguing. Do you have a pointer to something I could read that might expand on what you're saying here? (Aside from the emacs source.)

Amusing coincidence: the only Pratchet book I've read is The Fifth Elephant.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#26

Post by bachback »

beautiful post. the learning curve for getting into elisp land is steep. we need something like emacs in the future, something to evolve the emacs model as the self-evolutionary programmer's environment. the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age. it should be more tightly integrated with bash/linux/git, and have better exploration methods. i am not sure why nobody is working on this, besides lighttable. perhaps that is the problem with emacs/lisp. finding the valuable stuff out there takes time and is not build around sharing.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#27

Post by decasteve »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #18
FatalBaboon wrote: post #2

Emacs is one of those things everybody knows is good, but few take the time to learn. Over the years I've learnt quite a few languages, and what strikes me is that they're all so very alike. You find the same features with slight syntactic changes. At the end of the day, what really makes a difference is not which language you chose but what tools you are using. Do you have to memorize every important method or are t…

> Over the years I've learnt quite a few languages, and what strikes me is that they're all so very alike. I used to think this as well, then I learned some Prolog. For those who aren't familiar with it, Prolog is a logic programming language (as opposed to imperative and functional languages). Instead of telling Prolog how to solve a problem, you give it a set of facts and tell it what you want to know. Prolog takes…

I agree.

> Over the years I've learnt quite a few languages, and what strikes me is that they're all so very alike.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would seem to be even more applicable to programming languages (and fields of mathematics) than to spoken language itself.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#28

Post by to3m »

FatalBaboon wrote: post #9
etfb wrote: post #8

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smu…

They probably tried to make a common point: do not give the solution. For a given specific issue, the most you should give is pointers. For the function that solves your problem saves the day but knowing how to find any when needed solves a lifetime of problems. Pointers help to put you on the right track so you're not discouraged.

I don't know. For a given specific issue, I've actually found the solution pretty helpful!

And pointers can be given at the same time; there's no reason why an answer can't include both, as is most usually practical. It's fun to play the role of delphic oracle, but only as a joke that all concerned are in on, as it's terribly frustrating to be on the receiving end of it.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#29

Post by mr_luc »

leephillips wrote: post #25
stiff wrote: post #19

In common understanding of emacs, its use of lisp recieves perhaps too much attention, while its overall wonderful architecture is underappreciated. Emacs isnt just an editor with embedded lisp, its more a vm for bootstrapping editors. You could do an emacs with python, but the hard part is providing an environment where the extensions dont interfere with the user input loop, with buffer redisplay etc., while still s…

"The emacs buffer-based async handling of external processes is a masterpiece of software engineering, much better than things like unix pipes." This sounds intriguing. Do you have a pointer to something I could read that might expand on what you're saying here? (Aside from the emacs source.) Amusing coincidence: the only Pratchet book I've read is The Fifth Elephant .

Seconded! Like a lot of Emacs users, sure, I love Lisp. But I don't really understand how it's architected.

Sure, I understand that there is this abstraction of a Buffer. But it's quite abstract. I'd love to know what's happening under the hood.

I think a blog post that even gave a 37signals-blog-post-sized expansion of the grandparent's comment would probably be frontpaged on HN.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#30

Post by progman »

bachback wrote: post #26

beautiful post. the learning curve for getting into elisp land is steep. we need something like emacs in the future, something to evolve the emacs model as the self-evolutionary programmer's environment. the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age. it should be more tightly integrated with bash/linux/git, and have better exploration methods. i am not sure why nobody is working on this, besides lighttable.…

> the 1M LOC code is much too bloated for the modern age.

Why reinvent the wheel? Emacs works well enough, and computers are getting faster every generation. Many editors appeared, they all had the chance to make Emacs obsolete but they ALL failed. Every editor could challenge Emacs but obviously it is not so easy to compete.

I use Emacs for decades now because of its extreme stability (almost same version among many operationg systems) and extreme reliability (not a single crash ever). I have tested new editors from time to time but Emacs is still superior.

These are some raasons why Emacs is still alive today despite its ancient source code. Another reason is that Emacs depends on Lisp which is much more stable than modern standards like Python, Javascript and HTML5 which change pretty fast and make it difficult to keep big software up to date. For instance, imagine an Emacs like editor written in Python 2. Now the codebase would have to be changed to Python 3, and possibly soon to Python 4.

By the way, Haskell provides excellent support for DSLs. So it should be no problem to develop a tool which converts Haskell plugins (or Python or whatever) to Emacs elisp.

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