Re: configurable means hard? [was: ... easier explanation how to setup gnus ...]

[Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 7:32:06 PM UTC+5:30, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >         File
> >         - Why do I have five print options, and what's the difference?
> 
> Because Emacs doesn't offer a good way to print, so we offer various
> workarounds (I wish I were kidding).

Ha! Refreshing to hear some straight talk!


> > Why can’t we rename windows to panes and frames to windows?
> 
> We can, but it's hard: Emacs is structured in such a way that the user
> is exposed to the names used in the code.  So renaming windows to panes
> means renaming functions and variables, which leads to backward
> compatibility problems.

A technical and a social aspect to this.

Technical: Yeah, I see that its harder than I thought....
Still, taking a cue from python's 2to3 converter, it should be possible to have a 24to25 converter that among other things looks up a table of old-names and renames to new ones, for arbitrary elisp files.  Yeah I understand that presence of eval makes 100% coverage theoretically impossible.

Of course I am not seriously suggesting that this one trivia is worth this effort. Scale it up by the dozens of such oddities and the picture changes somewhat.  Brings me to the next...

Social: 
As analogy consider that at one time emacs only ran on unices.  Porting to windows -- hardly a core constituency!! -- would have driven the user population up by some factor, is it not?  And then some of those folks become core devs.

Likewise, reducing the combo of weirdness+steep learning curve (combined with some good PR!) would bring some valuable people into the fold (IMHO)