Re: Workshop to save M$ Windows users - help needed

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2021 01:26:59 -0300
> 
>   1. How in Elisp we can do lots of programs that are useful and that
>      fit in just one or two lines,
> 
>   2. How we can share complete short programs with the other people in
>      the workshop via chat. Parenthesis: I think that this will be the
>      most mind-blowing part of the worshop for most of the
>      participants... I am expecting an audience composed almost
>      exclusively of M$ Windows users - "MWUs" from here onwards - and
>      MWUs usually think that "programs" are huge beasts that only
>      super-nerds that understand,
> 
>   3. How bigger programs can be built from smaller programs - we will
>      play with some programs that are 5 to 10 lines long and made of
>      several defuns (yaaay!!!) and that are easy to tinker with.
> 
> What I described above is the part of the workshop that I already know
> how to teach, or to coordinate - "coordinate" because if everything
> goes well then I'll have ten people speaking on the chat all at the
> same time.
> 
> Now comes that part that I _DON'T_ know how to teach, and in which I
> would like to ask for help.
> 
> I don't know how MWUs think. I don't know how they memorize actions
> that are made of sequences of mouse clicks, I don't know how they take
> notes, and I don't know how they can deal with programs without having
> a clear mental model of what they do. I don't interact with them in
> person close to computers often, but practically every time that they
> see me using Emacs on my laptop they say "I don't have any idea how
> you can use that", so they also don't understand how I use the
> computer and how I think - it's reciprocal.
> 
> I talked to some MWUs who are interested in the workshop and they
> don't have any idea of how to use terminals - they think that in order
> to use a terminal one has to have a prodigious memory and prodigious
> typing skills. Terminals are COMPLETELY alien to them, and for several
> of them this is the main reason why they never tried to make their
> computers dual-boot and to install a GNU/Linux in a partition.
> 
> I believe that I can use a part of the workshop to show them how we
> can use something similar to the items (1), (2), and (3) above to run
> Bash in a shell buffer in Emacs, and to follow a basic tutorial on
> Bash... and that will make terminals far less alien to them.

I don't understand why you need to tell them to install Bash.
Installing Bash means installing MSYS2, which comes with lots of
ballast most people won't need.  In addition, Bash is a totally alien
beast for your audience, even if they are familiar with the Windows'
own shell, either cmd.exe or PowerShell.  You are raising the bar very
highly without any justification.

If your main goal is to teach them Emacs as the platform to do these
small jobs, my suggestion is to use Eshell.  Even that is already
problematic, because for some jobs they will have to install ports of
GNU tools: Grep, Diff, etc.  But at least they could limit themselves
to installing a small number of relatively small packages, and won't
need to deal with the mess of MSYS2 executables vs native Windows
(a.k.a. MinGW64) executables, and won't need Bash.