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Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

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Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#41

Post by billfruit »

worldsayshi wrote: post #29
Isamu wrote: post #3

(from the slides) >I learned Emacs in September, 1983 >It is now November, 2019 >...that’s over thirty six years! >An amazingly long time. Hmm, I think I learned Emacs around the same time. Yes, sometimes I think it is weird that I'm still using it. I get a lot of pushback when I say that the developer environment hasn't advanced amazingly in all those years. Devs will point to one or more rather small incremental im…

The main reason I quit Emacs was the lack of context and semantically aware code completion and re-factoring tools. Such tools are invaluable productivity boosts for me. I have never gotten that to work in Emacs to a satisfactory degree.

OTOH hlmost many modern IDEs can't even open two copies of the same file and display it side by side or record arbitrarily complex macros and play them back any number of times.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#43

Post by mickeyp »

GrayShade wrote: post #9
superbaconman wrote: post #4

As an emacs user I like the little rant about keyboards towards the end (54:27). It's stupid hard to find a laptop with good keys, good layout, good internals, and good battery.

I'm partial to the Emacs keybindings, but you you're so right about the laptop keyboards. Mine doesn't have an End key (Home, PgDn, PgUp, Power).

The benefit of Emacs's keybindings is that they're the default keys used by GNU readline (though it also supports Vi-style keys.)

That means when you know that Ctrl+E and Ctrl+A (`C-e' / `C-a') goes to the end or beginnings of a line in Emacs, you know it'll also work in your bash shell (or indeed any tool that uses GNU readline.)

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#44

Post by jerf »

jordigh wrote: post #8

So the slides say... > Concurrency safety isn’t an accident. So far,only Rust has a good story on concurrency thanks to its type system. Is that really true? I've really enjoyed concurrency in D. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/#day18 How much better can it be? And yes, D's concurrency is also based around types.

"So far, only Rust has a good story on concurrency thanks to its type system."

In the strongest sense of that phrase, Erlang and Haskell also have extremely strong concurrency stories, in that each in their own way, they forbid the most common mistakes. It's hard to compare which of these is "better" or "stronger" though since they all differ so much in how they approach the matter.

There are a number of other languages that can make claims to having a reasonable "concurrency story" if you combine the language with certain practices, which permits writing concurrent code in a reasonable fashion (i.e., not a disaster of locks), but that technically aren't necessarily better than C. D may fit in there. It may sound vacuous to say this, because you could always just port those practices back to an older language, and indeed, you can, but the community default matters because of the resulting library support. (Prime case study: Twisted and Python, with the way Twisted required essentially its own version of many significant bits of Python functionality to work in its environment; it could never completely take off because it was at such variance with what the community did by default.)

This class of languages is a more populated area, since it turns out while concurrent programming is never going to be completely trivial IMHO, the exponential complexity explosion of pure mutex-based systems that was such a disaster in the 1990s and early 2000s is more a problem of the primitives used to address the problem than the languages themselves. Mutexes are an invaluable tool, but not suitable as the "base" abstraction that programmers actually use.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#45

Post by seeker61 »

Isamu wrote: post #3

(from the slides) >I learned Emacs in September, 1983 >It is now November, 2019 >...that’s over thirty six years! >An amazingly long time. Hmm, I think I learned Emacs around the same time. Yes, sometimes I think it is weird that I'm still using it. I get a lot of pushback when I say that the developer environment hasn't advanced amazingly in all those years. Devs will point to one or more rather small incremental im…

"the Brone Age of programming."

And that's being generous.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#46

Post by fluffything »

falcolas wrote: post #28
jordigh wrote: post #8

So the slides say... > Concurrency safety isn’t an accident. So far,only Rust has a good story on concurrency thanks to its type system. Is that really true? I've really enjoyed concurrency in D. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/#day18 How much better can it be? And yes, D's concurrency is also based around types.

Frankly, not that much. Rust can primarily protect against memory usage race conditions, it can't catch most kinds of deadlocks or other concurrency issues.

Notice that Rust locks support dead-lock detection at run-time. You just need to enable the detection manually because it adds a run-time cost.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#47

Post by jypepin »

I really started to get lost when he started talking about never wanting to leave his text editor, wanting to read his emails in Emacs, browse the web in Emacs, have slack and discord in Emacs, etc.

Serious question: Why? Is it that hard to alt+tab? Especially, why would you want such distracting features inside your editor, while you are trying to focus and work?

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#48

Post by mickeyp »

Emacs turns disjoint environments, languages, and activities into a (mostly) streamlined system of workflows and idioms.

Explaining just how powerful that is to people who don't use Emacs is difficult. People need to sit with you for an hour or so and watch you work to truly appreciate just what that means.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

iudqnolq wrote: post #21

I'm new to Emacs, but enjoying it very much. Just got mu4e working with Gmail XOAUTH2 (for a G Suite account that the administrators have implemented their own "delightful login experience"). Would there be any interest in reading a writeup?

Definitely. I approached the set up mu4e + offlineimap over multiple accounts (including a GMail one) many times, and I've never been fully satisfied with it. I'd really want to get it to work flawlessly, so I'd love to be able to learn from your experience.
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