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From: Emmy Noether on 17 Jul 2010 14:11
On Jul 16, 1:41 am, Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTre...(a)cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 7/16/2010 12:23 AM, Xah Lee wrote:
>
>
>
> > It got closed right away i suppose partly has to do with my
> > unforgiving nature of criticizing and run-in with some GNU emacs
> > developers in gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs in the past 5 or so years.
>
> I think "criticizing" is an understatement for what you do.  Insulting and
> abusing might be closer to the truth.  You do write a lot of sense, but you
> also go off on rants occasionally writing stuff that has no place in civil
> conversation.  I am sure that the emacs developers try to be as professional as
> they can, but they would only be human if they undervalue your input because of
> your writing style.

Well, there is a lot of resistance from the emacs community in sharing
information. Richard Stallman is a true STALLER of progress. He has
held the whole process hostage by not sharing information. He has
RENEGED on his promise to make it truly open by suppressing
documentation of his softwares.

> > Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> > month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
> > public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
> > write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
> > full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
> > in the new doc would be accepted.
>
> If you can rewrite it in a month's time, then what are you waiting for?  You
> can write it and publish it on your own, calling it a "Modernized Emacs
> Manual".  If people find it valuable and it is accurate, then I am sure Gnu
> will distribute it.

The one who has the key can open the lock in a jiffy.

The one who does not have the key will take lots of labor to do it esp
if he has never opened the lock before.

All Richard Stallman has to do is to hand draw the data-structures and
architecture of the various programs. Give references to the places
where he got the ideas.

He does not even have to type. He can write with pencil and scan and
thats all. This way he can make marvelously elaborate diagrams. He can
even make audios or videos.

He has plenty of time to make POLITICAL videos. He has plenty of time
to to write that elaborate manual on LISP MACHINE PROPOSAL on the
internet.

Its less about bugs and more about releasing the details and tricks of
the softwares he has written.

Yes, he can do in one month because he has the key.

Will he do it only after he is anointed as a king in the temple of
Solomon ?

> > The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
> > bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
> > search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
> > Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
> > large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
> > tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
> > for a startup brainpower.com.)
>
> I go to gmane.emacs.bugs and view it in Thunderbird.  I have no problem finding
> my bug reports or any one else's.

The FSF people have intentionally erected lots of barriers for others.
FSF plays a crooked game and this will be discussed in detail.

In this video, Stall man makes 4 promises to public but stalls on 2nd
of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BfCJq_zIdk&feature=fvsr

1/ Freedom to Run to the Program
2/ Freedom to study the source code, you control it <------ Software
is a puzzle and it must be explained to be able to do that, its like a
lock
3/ Freedom to help your neightbors, share with them
4/ Freedom to contribute to your community

Software is a puzzle and it must be explained to be able to do that,
its like a lock

"to MAKE SURE you get the four freedoms"

He is WRONG !!! He has not made sure. He has not taken the first
steps.

Software architecture must be documented. A model minimal release must
be given. If it takes too long to document the program by writing in
Latex, then he can write by hand or make an video with camera on the
paper and he can talk.

From: Emmy Noether on 17 Jul 2010 14:34
On Jul 16, 2:59 pm, Xah Lee <xah...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> In comp.emacs Xah Lee <xah...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
> > It [a bug report] got closed right away i suppose partly has to do with
> > my unforgiving nature of criticizing and run-in with some GNU emacs
> > developers in gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs in the past 5 or so years.
>
> On Jul 16, 9:25 am, Alan Mackenzie <a...(a)muc.de> wrote:
>
> > It has to be said that that criticism has sometimes involved the use of
> > curse words.
>
> i admit that's true.

Didnt you say that you wrote several polite emails and it did not
work ??? Have some spine and say the truth !!!

> > So if your bug reports are getting things moved, what's so frustrating?
>
> couldn've been better.

You meant "could've"

> > > Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> > > month full time. (e.g. 160 hours)
>
> > I think it would take you a great deal longer than that.  But it would be
> > easy enough to experiment on.  Chose some chapter from the Emacs or Elisp
> > manual, fire away and see how long it takes you.
>
> btw, i don't think elisp manual needs to be re-worked, or at least not
> critical... but i think it's much critical that the emacs manual be.

What he needs is to give a clear and concise explanation of the data-
structures and algorithms of the software. If he used ideas from
others, he need to give reference to them so others can find it and
get into depth. There is no need to make professional diagrams using
xfig etc if it takes too much time. He only needs a scanner, pencil ,
eraser and a ruler.

Others who worked for him and learnt the hard way can also do it , but
I suspect he extracted such a price that they wont be able to give
freely. The XEMACs people deserve some commendation .

> > I think your changes would not be accepted as such.  Quite bluntly, your
> > English isn't good enough, so somebody would have to go through your
> > version eliminating solecisms.  There's a vast gap between being able to
> > use English adequately to transmit your meaning and being able to write
> > stylish and correct English.  Your English belongs to the former
> > category.  As a matter of interest, what is your native language?
>
> Haha, that's a good one.

This is why they brought indians to checkmate the chinese. They can
put this accusation of english as they used to do on the asians and
japanese throughout the 90s by Japanese Bashing. I remember very well
that George Bush senior vomited on the face of Toshiki Kaifu to insult
him intentionally in Japan. This is just a false excuse to give proper
space to you. I think you write excellently.

> i disconcur. See:
>
> • The Writing Style on XahLee.org
>  http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/xah_style.html
>
> > > (the GNU emacs dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS
> > > has been phased out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or
> > > projects. I think GNU emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge
> > > orgs have switched to git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g.
> > > FireFox, Google))
>
> > What's your source for "the vast majority" of projects no longer using
> > CVS, again as a matter of interest?
>
> sloppy exaggeration. Though, i would say “majority”, from experience.
> e.g. look at google and other large orgs commercial or open source,
> and look at the revision system supported by large project hosters
> such as google code, SourceForge, github...

Mackenzie, bring a properly written documentation by FSF for example
on emacs of gcc. I want to see where RMS got his ideas ? Did he invent
all of them himself ? Is he giving proper references to the sources of
the ideas ? Is that plagiarism ?

I am sick of such jews/zionists like RMS, Roman Polansky, Bernard
Madoff, Larry Ellison (he had to pay 100K in court to a chinese girl
he screwed), Stephen Wolfram, Albert Einstein spreading anti-semitism
by their flagrant unethical behaviour.

If you use someone else's ideas, give reference. Dont try to portray
yourself falsely as a genius by hiding sources and weaving rosy false
pictures of being a victim or born out of wedlock. you went to school
and got good education. you got insights from your community and good
mentorship from other jews in aggressive networking in the jews like
other communities dont have.

These are facts. Thats why these people dont stand to scrutiny and
questioning.

> > Emacs uses BZR, not SVN, and has
> > done since the beginning of 2010.
>
> Thanks for your correction. Updated my site.

Write a good documentation using pencil and scan that helps newbies
enter the field.

If it is not there, you will be subject of perpetual criticism and no
thanks.

> (also thanks to Uday S Reddy & David Kastrup for comment.)
>
>   Xah
> ∑http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄

From: Emmy Noether on 17 Jul 2010 14:43
On Jul 15, 4:23 pm, Xah Lee <xah...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> • GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
>  http://xahlee.org/emacs/GNU_Emacs_dev_inefficiency.html
>
> essay; commentary. Plain text version follows.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
>
> Xah Lee, 2010-07-15
>

> I've also written to Richard Stallman a few times in private in about
> 2008 or 2009, about documentation improvements. With extreme
> politeness and respect on my part.

You took good precaution to deny him any excuse to fend you off ... so
that we can all know the true reality of the situation. Its long said
by others that this idea of freedom is a bait. Still, I want to give
him / FSF a chance to prove their sincerity in enabling others in
reading the code and learning from it ...

> Without going into detail, i'm just
> disenchanted by his reaction. In short, it appears to me he did not
> pay much attention, and basically in the end asked me to submit
> changes to him. Yeah right. The whole shebang seems to be very well
> described by Ben Wing. (See: GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben
> Wing.) (Richard Stallman's emails are pretty short, just a couple
> terse sentences; but he does, however, whenever he got a chance, tell
> his correspondents to use the term GNU/Linux, and ask them to
> contribute.)
>
> Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
> public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
> write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
> full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
> in the new doc would be accepted.
>
> The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
> bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
> search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
> Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
> large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
> tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
> for a startup brainpower.com.)
>
> Am pretty sure there are several good “FSF Free” bug databases. (see:
> Comparison of issue-tracking systems) Few years ago, some may have
> problem to be politically qualified to be “Free” for FSF to adopt.
> However, these days there are many that FSF officially sactions as
> “Free”. However, when you look at FSF, you see that even when a
> software became free, they usually are still picky with lots qualms,
> and typically always ends up using their OWN ones (i.e. from GNU
> project), even though it is clear that it is inferior. (the GNU emacs
> dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS has been phased
> out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or projects. I think GNU
> emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge orgs have switched to
> git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g. FireFox, Google))
>
> These are consequence of old and large orgs, with its old policies and
> beaucracies. See: “Free” Software Morality, Richard Stallman, and
> Paperwork Bureaucracy.
>
> Who are the main developers of FSF software these days? Mostly, they
> are either paid as FSF employee, or students still trying to break out
> their craft in programing, or 40/50 years old semi-retired programers
> who otherwise isn't doing anything. Those willing and able, spend time
> and get decent salary in commercial corps, or went to start their own
> projects or business that'd be far more rewarding financially or not
> than being another name in FSF's list of contributors.
>
> These days, FSF and Richard Stallman more serves as a figure-head and
> political leader in open source movement. FSF's software, largely are
> old and outdated (e.g. unix command line utils), with the exception of
> perhaps GCC and GPG. If we go by actual impact of open source software
> in society, i think Google's role, and other commercial orgs (such as
> Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, various langs on JVM, and other project
> hosters hosting any odd-end single-man projects), exceeded FSF by
> ~2000.
>
>   Xah
> ∑http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄

From: Keith Thompson on 17 Jul 2010 16:56
Emmy Noether <emmynoether3(a)gmail.com> writes:
[98 lines deleted]

The parent article was posted to comp.emacs and comp.lang.lisp. Why
did you cross-post your followup to comp.lang.c, comp.lang.python,
and comp.lang.scheme?

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst-u(a)mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Nokia
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
-- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"
From: Tom Lord on 18 Jul 2010 13:26
On Jul 17, 11:11 am, Emmy Noether <emmynoeth...(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, there is a lot of resistance from the emacs community in sharing
> information. Richard Stallman is a true STALLER of progress. He has
> held the whole process hostage by not sharing information. He has
> RENEGED on his promise to make it truly open by suppressing
> documentation of his softwares.

I used to think similarly but differently. In my case
I thought of him as a "STALLER" for not more aggressively
changing Emacs to keep up with GUIs, with better languages
than elisp, with better ways to implement text buffers,
and so forth.

One day I woke up and realized: hey, I've been using this same
damn program for 15 years (and now, today, more than 20). I
use it every day. I'm annoyed on systems that lack it. It
satisfies me, as a user, in ways that almost no other program
I've used for a long time does.

Aha - I realized. He must be doing something right.

And it became way more interesting to try to understand
what he's doing right than to focus exclusively on what he's
doing wrong.

On the documentation thing ... well:

Stallman's code (and code descended from Stallman's code)
tends to annoy me with its sparcity of good commenting,
its long, convoluted functions, its sometimes wacky choices
of how to structure module dependencies, its horrific approach
to portability.....

Problem is, though, than when I've had to actually work
on any of that code? Yeah, it takes some hours or days
of study to puzzle it out - weeks even - but then once
you've "got it" you've got it. It's actually fairly lucid
in spite of the style.

One of the things he does right is not overly documenting
the code. First, it's a lot of work. Second, the folks
that wind up contributing the most to it learn a lot and learn
it well by puzzling it out a bit first on their own.
Yes, really. I'm not suggesting weak internals documentation
and all the other aspects as a general style that everyone
should adapt. I do think it slows some things down.
Yet in some cases, like Emacs, .... well, it's hard to argue
with success, ain't it?





> All Richard Stallman has to do is to hand draw the data-structures and
> architecture of the various programs. Give references to the places
> where he got the ideas.

Isn't that (the drawing) something you could do?

As for where he got the ideas: a lot of Emacs architecture is
based on common knowledge ideas, some on the order of 40 years
old. There's not a lot that isn't original in the core
architecture that one would normally want cites about.


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