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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

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Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#61

Post by wting »

aetherson wrote: post #56

I'll take issue with this claim: "Work environments are a very personal thing. They exist to serve only one person: you. Me-me-me is a winning attitude when dealing with your environment." I think it's considerably more important to have a (basically good) work environment in which your colleagues can sit down and use fluently than to have one that's absolutely optimized to your individual tastes.

Do you share workstations with your co-workers or do significant amounts of pair programming?

I'm not sure why my work environment should be optimized for a <1% use case.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#62

Post by wting »

aetherson wrote: post #56

I'll take issue with this claim: "Work environments are a very personal thing. They exist to serve only one person: you. Me-me-me is a winning attitude when dealing with your environment." I think it's considerably more important to have a (basically good) work environment in which your colleagues can sit down and use fluently than to have one that's absolutely optimized to your individual tastes.

Do you share workstations with your co-workers or do significant amounts of pair programming?

I'm not sure why my work environment should be optimized for a <1% use case.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#63

Post by aetherson »

wting wrote: post #61
aetherson wrote: post #56

I'll take issue with this claim: "Work environments are a very personal thing. They exist to serve only one person: you. Me-me-me is a winning attitude when dealing with your environment." I think it's considerably more important to have a (basically good) work environment in which your colleagues can sit down and use fluently than to have one that's absolutely optimized to your individual tastes.

Do you share workstations with your co-workers or do significant amounts of pair programming? I'm not sure why my work environment should be optimized for a <1% use case.

I do significant amounts of pair programming. But even more so, I don't think that your coworkers using your workstation should be a My contention is that:

1. Work environments -- including ones that don't formally pair -- should be highly collaborative.

2. It's typically massively less efficient to help someone past a block or communicate a new coding technique via telling them what to do rather than doing it. Much less anything even remotely iterative, where you need to, say, write some code, look at some output, and write some more code.

3. The difference between "a basically good development environment" and "a development environment that is specifically optimized for just specifically you" is actually quite small. There's no real need to sacrifice much of anything in order to get an environment optimized specifically for you.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#64

Post by ttuominen »

mickeyp wrote: post #42
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.

I must say your blog seems like a an excellent resource, thanks for what you are doing!

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#65

Post by klibertp »

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…

Well, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie had to go somewhere and what place would be better for them than Emacs? ;)

Actually I had exactly the same feeling when I started using Emacs: the very first thread on some newsgroup I remember reading was about moving lines up and down, like in sublime(?) with M-S-/. The poor guy who dared to ask was immediately told that this is "not the emacs way", that there are many better ways to do this and so on. Ofc, halfway through the thread I found working code which implemented this feature, but the impression it made was not very good.

But Emacs architecture and it's consequences, like extensibility and customizability, and giant heaps of free, working code are enough for me to just ignore people like this. Or rather to ignore most Emacs related discussions. It's good that Emacs makes it easy to just stay away from other people: all the docs, and the source, are there in the editor itself, so if you don't mind spending a bit of time you can figure anything on your own. Which is what I do and what I like doing.

But I certainly do understand your feelings in this matter and think they are justified.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#66

Post by agumonkey »

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 second you on LC. It profoundly impacted my brain. Mostly for the reason you mentioned, Closures, Church Encoding[1], Y, Combinators. It's almost vacuous yet it works. I love to rewatch talks about LC in ruby or javascript (well named 'programming with nothing').

[1] I like the fact that CE'd numbers are structural, a CE 2 will apply twice another function, instead of the usual stored symbol to be read/interpreted in most systems. Reminds me of 2.times() in ruby IIRC.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#67

Post by xiaomai »

ZaneA wrote: post #53
codygman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The great thing about evil is you can enable it in your .emacs and it mostly just works. But even better, because this is Emacs the vi layer is also easily extendable. Here's an example of adding other operators (adding `mit`, `mit>` etc): https://github.com/ZaneA/Dotfiles/blob/1858a02de25e25de20e96...

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems:

1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.)

2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is fine but the transition just seems daunting.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#68

Post by mickeyp »

ttuominen wrote: post #64
mickeyp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I must say your blog seems like a an excellent resource, thanks for what you are doing!

Glad to hear it :) Have fun!

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#69

Post by snogglethorpe »

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…

Er, I drop in on #emacs regularly, and people there are generally very nice, nothing like you describe.

Maybe you tried at the wrong moment and happened to get the attention of the rare jerk or two, or maybe you were doing something that managed to annoy people (you sometimes see people asking questions in very overbearing and demanding manner ... "Give me the answer now!!" etc).

Indeed, I'd say #emacs is actually a lot better than typical tech channels / mailing lists etc, and the stereotypical techy "attitude" is largely absent there. If anything the biggest problem with it is not attitude, it's that 95% of the discussion on #emacs is not about Emacs (it's kinda ... laid back), and your question might get lost in the noise...

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#70

Post by aoeuaue »

xiaomai wrote: post #67
ZaneA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great thing about evil is you can enable it in your .emacs and it mostly just works. But even better, because this is Emacs the vi layer is also easily extendable. Here's an example of adding other operators (adding `mit`, `mit>` etc): https://github.com/ZaneA/Dotfiles/blob/1858a02de25e25de20e96...

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems: 1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.) 2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is…

Prelude[1] is a great way to start with emacs. I don't have any experience with evil, though.

http://batsov.com/prelude/

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