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From: Tamas K Papp on 14 Jun 2010 08:50
On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:20:09 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> On 2010-06-14 11:41:19 +0100, Elena said:
>
>> Because it would be easier. Perl is neither the king nor the queen nor
>> crown prince when it comes to text processing. Emacs Lisp is.
>>
>>> Still, it would clearly be preferable to live somewhere else.
>>
>> Live in Emacs, then ^_^
>
> I spent almost 20 years doing that, and I am not, ever, going back. I
> mean, I'd have a PhD if it wasn't for Emacs (OK, I would have a PhD if
> it wasn't for Emacs and Unix).
>
> I can recommend a good clinic to get you off it, actually. It's a
> pretty unpleasant experience (the trembling, the desire to vomit, the
> visions of nameless tentacled horrors mostly go away after a while, but
> you never really get over the need for just one more minor mode, and the
> shambling horror of RMS will haunt your dreams for ever). But once
> you're clean you suddenly have an extra 8 hours a day to live in.

I guess this is not the first time I hear you comment on the
"addictiveness" of tinkering with Emacs. I find your experience different
from mine: I have been an Emacs user for about 10 years, and only got
interested in Lisp (CL) in the last two. I never felt the urge to
tinker excessively with Emacs. Whenever I had a problem, I just
searched the net for a solution and used someone else's code snippets.
Some of the files in my .emacs.d directory have modification dates
going back to 2006. Stuff just works.

Now that I know some CL, I once wondered about how nice it would be if
Emacs Lisp was more similar to CL. But then I realized that I still
would not want to program Emacs: it just works, and whenever I have an
issue, I find that people already wrote a package for that. I always
find programming problems that are much more interesting than
tinkering with my editor.

Thus I would consider the possibility that your desire to waste time
tinkering is not Emacs-specific.

Best,

Tamas
From: Tim Bradshaw on 14 Jun 2010 09:48
On 2010-06-14 13:50:06 +0100, Tamas K Papp said:

> Thus I would consider the possibility that your desire to waste time
> tinkering is not Emacs-specific.

I agree, see other reply

From: Tim Bradshaw on 14 Jun 2010 10:18
On 2010-06-14 13:25:11 +0100, Elena said:

> Would you care to explain further, please? Do you mean learning Emacs
> is a waste of time?

Well, a lot of people (me emphatically included) spend an awful lot of
time playing around with computers while persuading themselves that
what they are doing is work, when in fact it is a mechanism for
avoiding work. Not everyone suffers from this, but for people who do,
Emacs is fairly dangerous, to say the least: you can waste a *lot* of
time on Emacs, if you are so inclined.

Usenet is a somewhat related thing - a lot of people spent a vast
amount of time on it, and one has to wonder to what end? Of course the
modern Usenet is Facebook/twitter/what-have-you.

And you see quite closely related things in CLL: people will sit around
and complain seemingly without end about how CL is making it impossible
to get anything done, and of course this is generally because they are
furiously trying to avoid getting anything done by erecting endless
barriers of their own invention.

So no, this isn't to do with Emacs, it's to do with people. (Well, of
course Emacs would not exist in its current form if it was not for the
millions of hours invested in it by people avoiding doing real work).

>
> What's your setup today (to replace Emacs)?

I still use Emacs when I have to (which seems to be around once a
week), but, for instance I don't read mail or news using Emacs, and I
use Lisp environments which come with their own editors and so on.

But as I say, this is people, not Emacs really. I think this kind of
getting-lost-in-a-tool turns out to be rather common however, and my
response to it is to be increasingly intentionally minimalist (examples
from different fields: I play the guitar, and after years wasting time
with electronics I now use basically a good guitar and a good valve
(tube) amp, and that's (almost) it: if I can't make interesting music
with a setup like that, then a sea of electronics is not going to help
me. I take pictures with a film camera with a single prime lens - not
because I think it's better than digital (it isn't) but because it is
*hugely simpler*.)

--tim

From: Udyant Wig on 14 Jun 2010 14:52
On Jun 14, 7:18 pm, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
> But as I say, this is people, not Emacs really.  I think this kind of
> getting-lost-in-a-tool turns out to be rather common however, and my
> response to it is to be increasingly intentionally minimalist
-snip-
> --tim

Try vi, primitive minimalism. Plus, you cannot get lost in it.

Or would that be going too far down the dark way?
From: Rob Warnock on 14 Jun 2010 20:22
Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
+---------------
| [I did once work on a system with an editor in which you could only go
| forward through the file.]
+---------------

*TECO*, for the win!!

[Well, you could go backwards within one buffer load, but if you stepped
to the next buffer then you had to close & re-open the file to get back.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock <rpw3(a)rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607

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