From: Mark Crispin on
On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, Xah Lee posted:
> Personally, i find moving by visual line is not just a good feature,
> but a critical one, with consequences that effect the evolution of
> language design and thinking, long term. The hard-coded lines is
> fundamentally introduced by unix and C gang, and brain damaged a whole
> generation of coders.

This is why UNIX and C accomplish things. They were based upon
accomplishing something useful rather than promoting an ideology.

It sounds like Microsoft Word is more suitable for the sort of work that
you do. Perhaps you ought to use Word instead of seeking to make emacs
become more like Word.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
From: Xah Lee on

hi Mark Crispin,

On Jun 4, 11:18 am, Mark Crispin <m...(a)panda.com> wrote:
> This is why UNIX and C accomplish things.  They were based upon
> accomplishing something useful rather than promoting an ideology.

maybe you shouldn't use emacs? Emacs is main part of GNU's Not Unix,
and the whole lisp culture and thinking is contrary to unix and C.

> It sounds like Microsoft Word is more suitable for the sort of work that
> you do.  Perhaps you ought to use Word instead of seeking to make emacs
> become more like Word.

speaking of Microsoft Word, i wait for dinosaurs like u to die. The
question is, can we recruit enough new generation of coders to emacs
fast enough before emacs extinguishes.

LOL!

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄
From: Mark Crispin on
On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, Xah Lee posted:
> maybe you shouldn't use emacs? Emacs is main part of GNU's Not Unix,

emacs predates GNU by several years.

I was there at emacs' creation, and I used its predecessors. I had only a
very minor role in its software development, but I had an influence on the
design of some of the basic commands (I remember, although RMS may have
forgotten).

> and the whole lisp culture and thinking is contrary to unix and C.

emacs was not originally written in LISP. It was many years later that it
was ported to LISP.

Not that I dislike LISP. Quite the contrary; my history with LISP is
longer than with C. I wrote the first IMAP client in LISP, and years
later (1989) reimplemented it in Objective-C.

On the other hand, I acknowledge Richard Gabriel's essay about why "Worse
is Better". I doubt that anyone would be presumptous enough to imply that
Gabriel is ignorant about LISP! He convincingly demonstrates why UNIX and
C won, while ITS and LISP lost. That essay was a particularly bitter pill
to swallow for those of us who spent many years in the MIT/Stanford
environment (nearly 15 years for me); but it was spot-on.

> speaking of Microsoft Word, i wait for dinosaurs like u to die.

You seem to have some serious psychological problems.

> The
> question is, can we recruit enough new generation of coders to emacs
> fast enough before emacs extinguishes.

If emacs "extinguishes", it will because it no longer provides a benefit
that overcomes its demerits.

There are many word processors, most of which perform that task quite a
bit better than emacs. emacs provides a particular benefit, and fills a
niche that is not served by word processors.

The world is not made a better place by undermining that benefit in order
to transform emacs from a superior text editor to an inferior word
processor.

I can understand the frustration of being unable to convince a word
processor user to try emacs. Nonetheless, it is unwise to alienate the
core constituency when purposing to expand the constituency.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
From: Mark Crispin on
On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Xah Lee posted:
> am curious, if you know Daniel Weinreb, and who used emacs first.
> Daniel wrote: "Nobody has been using Emacs longer than I have (I was
> one of the original beta-testers. I refer here to the original Emacs,
> written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.) "

DLW was there, and was quite a bit closer to the thick of things than I
was. I had returned to complete my undergraduate education in another
state a few months before.

In reading his quote, DLW does not claim to be "the first"; he simply
says that nobody has used it longer than he has.

There was no single person who was "first". I can think of at least a
half dozen individuals without trying who would share the spot with him.
The actual number is probably at least twice that.

I started using emacs within a couple of days of DLW. I knew of the
project (it had started the previous summer). When I started noticing (I
was remote via ARPAnet on a 300 bps dialup) that people were running "E",
instead of what they were running before, I put two and two together at
once and joined the fun.

This would have been December 1976 - January 1977.

emacs was barely usable then, with frequent crashes, but it improved very
quickly. It was also somewhat difficult to use, as I did not have a
cursor-addressed display terminal (yes, it was possible to use it in
"glass teletype" mode). It may have been a couple of months after that
before I finally was able to try emacs in full display mode.

I know that by the spring of 1977 I had access to an ADM-3A which had
cursor addressing...but very little else good to say about it as a display
terminal. I wrote a term paper using emacs on it, at 300 baud. Today,
such torture would probably be banned by UN treaty.

I used the predecessors of emacs for at least a year before DLW arrived.
My macro library, with its symmetry between control and meta that emacs
copied, was an extension of the TECMAC library. TECMAC and another
library called TMACS were the two main streams that became emacs.

Most of emacs' fundamental key bindings came from TECMAC, but there were
significant differences. For example, TECMAC used C-Y C-Y for what in
emacs was first C-X C-R and later became C-X C-F. TMACS' influence was
especially felt in the M-X commands. emacs fused these.

The fundamental behaviors of C-A, C-E, C-N, and C-P were all in TECMAC.
Now that I think about it, I think that they were in ^R mode in TECO
before that. They're very old behaviors.

I'm not certain now - DLW will definitely correct me if I am wrong - but I
am pretty sure that DLW wrote the first clone of emacs. It was on the
Lisp Machine, written in Lisp Machine LISP (a superset of MacLISP; Common
LISP didn't exist yet) and was called EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs). Its
successor was ZWEI.

DLW is a good guy and a very bright programmer.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
From: Uday S Reddy on
On 6/5/2010 11:28 PM, Xah Lee wrote:

> I respect your recognized contribution to humanity as a computer
> programer. However, not sure if you are aware, that i've argued with
> well known emacs and lisp old timers for the past 10 years

Thank God that some civility has returned to this thread!

> to argue, first let's be precise what we are arguing about. Here's few
> points:
>
> • emacs 23's introduction of line-move-visual feature is good (or
> bad).
>
> • emacs 23's default of line-move-visual t good (or bad)
>
> • the very concep of move by screen line is good (or bad).

No, I don't think that these are the questions that this debate is about. (When we start debating what the debate is about, we should realize that we are hopelessly knotted up in circles!)

Emacs 23 has a *visual line mode* and a *logical line mode* (the default mode that you have whenever the visual-line-mode is /not/ turned on).

Everybody understands and expects that C-n moves by visual line in the visual line mode. The question is, do you want it to move by visual line or logical line in the *logical line mode*?

Let me repeat: do you want C-n to move by visual line or logical in the *logical line mode*?

In the megabytes of debate that has gone on on this issue, I haven't seen a single point mentioned as to why it should move by visual line in the logical line mode. Yet, that is the default in Emacs 23! Worse, it *changes* the semantics of C-n which as, Mark Crispin points out, has been here the 70's.

So, there are three things that an old-timer is annoyed about:

1. Change of established semantics.

2. Inconsistency.

3. Pointlessness.

Coupled with these real technical issues, there are the attitudinal problems of holier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou and modern-than-thou and what have you. In another part of this thread, we have also seen the astonishing idea that the developers don't have to care about what the users want/need. If that is the attitude that open source developers take, then I will be the first to give up open source!

Cheers,
Uday