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You seem awfully riled up about a text editor. This rant is mostly incoherent, and probably a troll, but I'll bite. > I think emacs is probably one of the bigg

You seem awfully riled up about a text editor. This rant is mostly incoherent, and probably a troll, but I'll bite. > I think emacs is probably one of the biggest mistakes to ever happen to computer science. Emacs has nothing more to do with computer science than hammers and nails do with architecture. It's just a tool used to write code; computer science is about thinking algorithmically and mathematically about computation and problem solving. > First, let's remember that emacs is not powerful in and of itself. It requires mastery to understand the potential and power that lies in it. The inclusion of emacs lisp is amazing, but seriously? Have you programmed a separate application in emacs lisp? You haven't? What? You used Scheme or Common Lisp instead? Than why the fuck are you defending emacs lisp? Does anyone really push Emacs Lisp as a general purpose language? Really? I realize that Emacs is quite a bit more than just a text editor, but I've never heard it seriously recommended as an alternative to other languages for application development. No one is writing the next big revolution in software using Emacs Lisp, nor is anyone saying that we should. The language is specialized for customizing and extending Emacs, and nothing more. Vim has its own extension language too, which is even more domain-specific. Are you seriously arguing that the use of specialized languages for the tasks that they're designed to accomplish is indefensible, simply because general-purpose languages also exist? > And that's the whole fucking point of computer science. It's not writing the "greatest" programs. It's sharing. Sharing techniques, skills, libraries and ideas. And emacs is an artificial barrier. And worse than that, the most elite people in CS continue to protect it and cannot comprehend that their elitism is to the detriment to CS as a whole. It's complicated, arbitrary and designed in a terrible manner. I don't care if it makes sense to you. What matters is that you should be able to easily defend any design decision. And you can't. How in the world is Emacs, or any programming tool, a "barrier" to computer science? No one is forcing you to use Emacs. If you don't like it, don't use it. There is nothing about Emacs that prevents "sharing techniques, skills, libraries, and ideas". Whether or not it's "complicated, arbitrary, and designed in a terrible manner" is a matter of opinion. Plenty of people feel that way; plenty of others don't. Souped-up text editors like Emacs and Vim are certainly designed for expert users and do little to assist newcomers. So should those of us that are experts just throw out our advanced tools and switch to MS Notepad? The learning curve exists, no doubt, but there is a payoff to surmounting it. Why else would these tools have so many adherents? > We need more people to start programming. We need better editors. Why is it that CS has some of the oldest, most decrepit tools with the most adamant defenders? Why? Emacs is old, sure. That says nothing about whether it's worthwhile. Sometimes the earliest ideas in a particular field are the most revolutionary. And if you have better ones, then what's stopping you from making them a reality? There is no shortage of editors out there that are more approachable to newbie programmers than this "advanced" kind. I'm a huge Vim user, and I think it's a fantastic piece of software that I could hardly do without, but I would not recommend anything of the sort to a newcomer. There are plenty of tools for that demographic, but when it comes to text editors for "veteran" programmers, there are really only the two big ones, plus a handful of others that lie somewhere in between in terms of complexity and power. I find it very hard to believe that new programmers are being turned off to the field by Emacs, of all things. There are countless aspects of the process of learning to program computers that are far more difficult than choosing a text editor appropriate for your needs. > Seriously, we deal with fucking computers all day. The most arbitrary representation of knowledge possible. And all people do is whine about how things are "good enough" or "no, someone made this decision a long time ago, and now a lot of people make the same choice, so don't be stupid and choose that." Again, you seem awfully bent on disparaging the status quo without offering any real alternatives. > The number of new computer languages being invented is almost fucking SLOWING down. WTF? Computer science is about the drive to find better ways to express and share knowledge, and that means trying new things. Usually, they will suck. But jesus, we have to keep trying. And whatever we do, we have to help a). more people try programming, and stick to it b). support people following their own loony ideas. The quantity of new languages being invented is hardly a great metric by which to measure innovation. Maybe most of the great ideas in programming language design have already been had, and now it's a matter of incremental refinement, ad infinitum. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case, but it could be. And what any of that has to do with text editors is utterly beyond my comprehension. > I mean seriously, it's fucking sad how slow shit happens. Common lisp, one of the more powerful languages ever invented, got a wonderful tool called quicklisp last year. 15 FUCKING YEARS AFTER CPAN CAME OUT. Why the fuck is shit so fucked up, I mean jesus, it's fucking inexcusable. Our descendants are going to mock us to our faces til we fucking hara-kiri. Another complete non sequitur. And liberal usage of profanity does nothing to make your argument more compelling.

derpsaidderp 15y ago
Yes, Emacs is useful. Yes, it can be used for great things. Am I smart enough to know how to fix it? No. Do I have any solutions to the problems I perceive? No. But, that DOES not mean that they do not exist. We're riding the back of Moore's law and we can't even take advantage of it. Think about it this way: take something you like, or think is well designed, and imagine it 10 years in the future. Now 20. Then 30. And so on. When does it start being a piece of shit? Because, you see, everything besides art and the most practical devices turn to shit eventually. It's happening to emacs, and a lot of other software, and no one wants to admit to it. You're right, algorithms are timeless. But, you are an absolute idiot if you think that the tools we use don't influence how we conceptualize things. If you use C, it's almost impossible to think in a pointer-free manner (I mean stacks, not gc). Or that the tools we use influence who tries it. Most people have a horrid view of cs, and for good reason. The tools we use represent cs, and they do so poorly. Very, very poorly. The point isn't emacs. Or quicklisp. It's that people become too satisfied with the status quo. They are happy to master what exists, and pride themselves in that. And they should, we need that. But, we also need anarchy. We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. I want to make this clear: I am an absolute idiot on this forum compared to most of you guys. But, that doesn't mean I can't be on the right side of fate, or understand that. You're right, no one is forcing me to use emacs. Or gdb. Or Windows. Or C++. Or internet explorer. But guess what, they all get pushed by the popular kids.
- kamaal 15y ago
  >>We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. This is right, but something like Emacs isn't a joke to invent, maintain and grow. Look of it something like, Emacs is a tool designed to work hundreds and thousands line of code. And that's only a beginning. You need to make all that text context sensitive to each other. You need features to make enable heavy text lifting, automating complex text editing, and then enabling them all through macros. And not just that, you need features to run a shell inside the editor. You need to enable code-checkin features. May be to do to a quick check you need to read some news or read email. You need enable code profiling, features to enable seamless debugging. You also need to manage to-do lists. As you will see the list is only growing. And again, you need to make all that programmer friendly, you need to enable to do all that through just keyboard because tend to be in efficient source of input for that kind of editing. How many tools since the advent of programming have been to do all that? And still be maintainable, relevant and usable for so long as Emacs and vim? I hope it was as easy to build a editor that would make coding all milk and honey. But with generations of programmers and their combined effort is what Emacs and Vi is all about.

derpsaidderp 15y ago

Yes, Emacs is useful. Yes, it can be used for great things. Am I smart enough to know how to fix it? No. Do I have any solutions to the problems I perceive? No. But, that DOES not mean that they do not exist. We're riding the back of Moore's law and we can't even take advantage of it. Think about it this way: take something you like, or think is well designed, and imagine it 10 years in the future. Now 20. Then 30. And so on. When does it start being a piece of shit? Because, you see, everything besides art and the most practical devices turn to shit eventually. It's happening to emacs, and a lot of other software, and no one wants to admit to it. You're right, algorithms are timeless. But, you are an absolute idiot if you think that the tools we use don't influence how we conceptualize things. If you use C, it's almost impossible to think in a pointer-free manner (I mean stacks, not gc). Or that the tools we use influence who tries it. Most people have a horrid view of cs, and for good reason. The tools we use represent cs, and they do so poorly. Very, very poorly. The point isn't emacs. Or quicklisp. It's that people become too satisfied with the status quo. They are happy to master what exists, and pride themselves in that. And they should, we need that. But, we also need anarchy. We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. I want to make this clear: I am an absolute idiot on this forum compared to most of you guys. But, that doesn't mean I can't be on the right side of fate, or understand that. You're right, no one is forcing me to use emacs. Or gdb. Or Windows. Or C++. Or internet explorer. But guess what, they all get pushed by the popular kids.

kamaal 15y ago
>>We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. This is right, but something like Emacs isn't a joke to invent, maintain and grow. Look of it something like, Emacs is a tool designed to work hundreds and thousands line of code. And that's only a beginning. You need to make all that text context sensitive to each other. You need features to make enable heavy text lifting, automating complex text editing, and then enabling them all through macros. And not just that, you need features to run a shell inside the editor. You need to enable code-checkin features. May be to do to a quick check you need to read some news or read email. You need enable code profiling, features to enable seamless debugging. You also need to manage to-do lists. As you will see the list is only growing. And again, you need to make all that programmer friendly, you need to enable to do all that through just keyboard because tend to be in efficient source of input for that kind of editing. How many tools since the advent of programming have been to do all that? And still be maintainable, relevant and usable for so long as Emacs and vim? I hope it was as easy to build a editor that would make coding all milk and honey. But with generations of programmers and their combined effort is what Emacs and Vi is all about.