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Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

chrisdone.com

81–85 of 85 posts

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#81

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.

If you pair a majority of the time, sure, make a standardized workstation with your team. My team uses viemu in VS, which the rest of our office detests, but hey, we are the ones pairing 99% of the time. When I am not pairing for the majority, I setup my machine to my tastes, and simply install a "default" editor for the few times someone else actually needs to type on my machine. Emacs and IDEA both have good ways t…

I'm not advocating accepting an editor or IDE default, I'm advocating a standardized environment for a company. If rainbow parens are super-useful, then they can be super-useful for everybody.

And that's another thing that a standardized environment does: it gets techniques out there for the whole team. Because honestly I don't really believe that all that many people are truly getting their environments perfectly optimized for themselves. I think that most people in a shop where everyone does their own thing end up with high un-optimized environments.

Good environments for all, that everyone can use is better than perfect environments for a few, and mediocre environments for most, plus lack of interoperability.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pair a majority of the time, sure, make a standardized workstation with your team. My team uses viemu in VS, which the rest of our office detests, but hey, we are the ones pairing 99% of the time. When I am not pairing for the majority, I setup my machine to my tastes, and simply install a "default" editor for the few times someone else actually needs to type on my machine. Emacs and IDEA both have good ways t…

I'm not advocating accepting an editor or IDE default, I'm advocating a standardized environment for a company. If rainbow parens are super-useful, then they can be super-useful for everybody. And that's another thing that a standardized environment does: it gets techniques out there for the whole team. Because honestly I don't really believe that all that many people are truly getting their environments perfectly op…

I could see this for a small team _in the right circumstances_ but for a whole company? That seems difficult if you are larger than 20. Imagine the headache trying to get a tool approved for even a 100 person office. And who would approve it, the manager? I see the logic that says everyone should use the best, the problem is now you take the power from the individual who best knows his job and give it to some central person who might not understand people's needs as well.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not advocating accepting an editor or IDE default, I'm advocating a standardized environment for a company. If rainbow parens are super-useful, then they can be super-useful for everybody. And that's another thing that a standardized environment does: it gets techniques out there for the whole team. Because honestly I don't really believe that all that many people are truly getting their environments perfectly op…

I could see this for a small team _in the right circumstances_ but for a whole company? That seems difficult if you are larger than 20. Imagine the headache trying to get a tool approved for even a 100 person office. And who would approve it, the manager? I see the logic that says everyone should use the best, the problem is now you take the power from the individual who best knows his job and give it to some central…

Pivotal Labs, for example, does it with much larger than 100 person offices. They've got a repository here ( https://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout ) with their recipes for setting up their workstations. They have 72 contributors to the repo, so I guess it's not just a centralized manager.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#84
post #30

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…

> 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.

I've been thinking about adding Haskell as an additional language for Emacs alongside Elisp. It would be nice to be able to use both.

Re: Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see this for a small team _in the right circumstances_ but for a whole company? That seems difficult if you are larger than 20. Imagine the headache trying to get a tool approved for even a 100 person office. And who would approve it, the manager? I see the logic that says everyone should use the best, the problem is now you take the power from the individual who best knows his job and give it to some central…

Pivotal Labs, for example, does it with much larger than 100 person offices. They've got a repository here ( https://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout ) with their recipes for setting up their workstations. They have 72 contributors to the repo, so I guess it's not just a centralized manager.

Do they dictate things like emacs settings? I thought sprout was for stuff like ruby version and git configs.
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