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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

#41

Post by terhechte »

thirdtruck wrote: post #33
leephillips wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 .

Just wanted to recommend reading more Pratchett. :) I bought a couple more novels last week and couldn't help but finish one ( Equal Rites ) less than twenty four hours later.

I've read more than 20 Pratchett books (I think I didn't read the last 2-3) and there're two absolutely great books among them:

- Nightwatch: Great idea, fantastically written

- Going Postal: Great book for everybody who reads HN. Great characters, storyline, and fantasy meets hacking.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#42

Post by mickeyp »

dbalan wrote: post #31

one thing I struggle with emacs is that I can't find a place which documents the emacs way of doing things. Emacs has multitude of features, there are just too many to master, yet even to know that they exist. One example would be rectangle select http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Rec... , I absolutely love them - but till one of colleague introduced them to me, I had no idea they existed.

I try to write long articles explaining Emacs workflow over at http://www.masteringemacs.org. You may be interested in my latest post on discover.el.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#43

Post by scotty79 »

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…

That's the kind of answer that I hate the most. It's basically "you can't and more importantly you shouldn't want that" If you don't know what kind is that just ask how to make PostgreSQL COUNTs as fast as MySQL ones. Conversly I love people who when someone asks them how to shoot himself in the head with a rifle carefully caution what a bullet does to a head but only after explaining how one could actually perform this trick.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#44

Post by riffraff »

belorn wrote: post #34
riffraff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

The example you think was exaggeration was when someone told me to check a recent patch for the answer, and the patch was several thousand line of low level C. Worse case, sure, but an actually thing that did happen. I have used the python django IRC channel when developing some sites, and "check the source" has been the most common answer when I run into walls. Usefully, the questions I make receives some basic "see…

sorry, I didn't mean that "UTSL" isn't a realistic answer, I meant that is not the normal irc experience for all existing software projects.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#45

Post by jjaredsimpson »

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…

You used Emacs for 20 years and one bad interaction on IRC which caused you throw away all that acquired knowledge, let alone elisp you wrote?

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#46

Post by thirdtruck »

terhechte wrote: post #41
thirdtruck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to recommend reading more Pratchett. :) I bought a couple more novels last week and couldn't help but finish one ( Equal Rites ) less than twenty four hours later.

I've read more than 20 Pratchett books (I think I didn't read the last 2-3) and there're two absolutely great books among them: - Nightwatch: Great idea, fantastically written - Going Postal: Great book for everybody who reads HN. Great characters, storyline, and fantasy meets hacking.

And I very nearly picked up both of those that night. I'd grab them right away if my physical to-read stack didn't already stand a few feet high.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#47

Post by justinhj »

kabdib wrote: post #22
etfb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

Appropriately, I think that was Terry Pratchett

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#48

Post by justinhj »

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…

Stackoverflow is a good place to get fast answers to emacs questions. By the way I use IDE's like PHP Storm, Intelli-J and Eclipse in conjunction with emacs. Switching between the two depending on the task. Sorry you decided emacs wasn't for you but it doesn't have to be an either/or. Use the best tool for the job at hand.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#49

Post by codygman »

leephillips wrote: post #39
stiff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will try to explain. When I came to emacs as a user, a "buffer" seemed just a weird way of saying "tab" without displaying actual tabs. The word choice only started making more sense once I wrote non-trivial amounts of emacslisp. The buffer is the fundamental emacs data structure, like the file is the fundamental unix data structure, so it's really important to understand it well. The definition is really simple: a…

Thanks for taking the trouble to write all this (when all I asked for was a link). It gives a good flavor of what you're talking about. I used to read network news inside of emacs, using a mode called gnus, decades ago, and before I switched to vim. That's probably an example of a complex application that could be written within emacs because of the architecture that you describe. This extensibility is tempting me to…

I've been using emacs for a while (after vim for 6, 7... 8 years?) and have recently been looking at evil. I can't seem to find any really comprehensive tutorials for Evil mode, though I haven't put a lot of work towards it.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#50

Post by wonderzombie »

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…

Agree w/ siblings that this is a great comment. I'd like to amplify it.

A lot of imperative languages end up being really similar once you've learned a few of them. I'm not an expert on PL history but, AIUI, ALGOL was the progenitor for many modern languages, especially imperative ones. So it makes sense as to why, but there are paradigms other than imperative or even functional.

Of course this is not to say that all imperative languages are the same. Rather it is to say that alikeness is relative. Relative to C, Java is quite different. Relative to Prolog or Forth, C and Java are more similar than not.

If anyone really wants to expand their brain to new ways of thinking wrt programming, I think exploring these off-the-beaten-path programming languages is a great idea. I agree that many people around you will think you're nuts. As long as you don't lose your sense of practicality, pragmatism, and/or proportion, you shouldn't listen to them.

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