Rapidly navigating buffers using search

Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Jonathan Groll]

For quick navigation, I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r
(isearch-backward) for a phrase that catches my eye so that I can
quickly move to that part of the buffer. I *think* this is a technique
that a lot of us use for rapidly navigating buffers.

The thing is, what do you type when you want to exit the search? I
usually type C-SPC (set-mark) or if I'm feeling certain then I might
press something like C-d. Is there a better way to exit the search
without the unintended consequences (such as setting mark?) I also do
find it difficult to hold in my head that exiting a forward search
drops me at the end of the search result and vice-versa for a reverse
search.

Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?

Cheers,
Jonathan

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Aidan Gauland]

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> Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?

I usually do what you do, but I hit return, instead of C-<SPC>.  I also
sometimes use occur: M-s o.

Regards,
Aidan Gauland


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Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Thierry Volpiatto]

Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za> writes:

> For quick navigation, I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r
> (isearch-backward) for a phrase that catches my eye so that I can
> quickly move to that part of the buffer. I *think* this is a technique
> that a lot of us use for rapidly navigating buffers.
>
> The thing is, what do you type when you want to exit the search? I
> usually type C-SPC (set-mark) or if I'm feeling certain then I might
> press something like C-d. Is there a better way to exit the search
> without the unintended consequences (such as setting mark?) I also do
> find it difficult to hold in my head that exiting a forward search
> drops me at the end of the search result and vice-versa for a reverse
> search.
>
> Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?

Have a look at ioccur.el:

hg clone http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/ioccur
hg update -C development

> Cheers,
> Jonathan
>
>

-- 
Thierry Volpiatto
Gpg key: http://pgp.mit.edu/

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Qiang Guo]

Try C-g which will cancel the action, that's what I do in
this situation.

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Jonathan Groll]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 01:40:46AM -0600, Qiang Guo wrote:
>
>Try C-g which will cancel the action, that's what I do in
>this situation.

The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Stefan Kamphausen]

Hi,

Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za> writes:

> For quick navigation, I use C-s (isearch-forward) and C-r
> (isearch-backward) for a phrase that catches my eye so that I can
> quickly move to that part of the buffer. I *think* this is a technique
> that a lot of us use for rapidly navigating buffers.
>
> The thing is, what do you type when you want to exit the search? I
> usually type C-SPC (set-mark) or if I'm feeling certain then I might
> press something like C-d. Is there a better way to exit the search
> without the unintended consequences (such as setting mark?)

just type a movement command, e.g. a cursor key.

Cheers,
Stefan
-- 
a blessed +42 regexp of confusion (weapon in hand)
You hit. The format string crumbles and turns to dust.
user=> (clojure-buch (Locale/GERMANY))
#<URL http://www.clojure-buch.de>

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Andrea Crotti]

>
> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>
> Cheers,
> Jonathan

If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Deniz Dogan]

2010/7/7 Andrea Crotti <andrea.crotti.0@gmail.com>:
>
>>
>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jonathan
>
> If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
>

That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
you use RET.

-- 
Deniz Dogan

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Jonathan Groll]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 11:33:51AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
>2010/7/7 Andrea Crotti <andrea.crotti.0@gmail.com>:
>>
>>>
>>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
>>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>>>
>>
>> If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
>>
>
>That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
>you use RET.
>
Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
manual under "basics of incremental search" too.

Regards,
Jonathan

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Aidan Gauland]

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Jonathan Groll wrote:
> Any body want to share their technique for rapidly navigating buffers?

The defaults are fine for me, but I seem to remember that the defaults for GNU
Emacs 21 were not.  Anyway, try M-x customize-group <RET> mouse and M-x
customize-apropos <RET> scroll and see if any of the options that turns up are
what you're after.

Regards,
Aidan Gauland


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Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[despen]

Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:

> On Jul 7, 3:25 am, Jonathan Groll <li...@groll.co.za> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 11:33:51AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
>> >2010/7/7 Andrea Crotti <andrea.crott...@gmail.com>:
>>
>> >>> The idea though is to move point to the text you are interested
>> >>> in. C-g leaves you back where you started from.
>>
>> >> If you press RET doesn't it leave you where you want exiting the search?
>>
>> >That's right, Emacs even echoes "Mark saved where search started" when
>> >you use RET.
>>
>> Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
>> been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
>> manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
>
> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
> writing a emacs tutorial)
>
> this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
> something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
> something wrong with the manual.

There's nothing wrong with the manual.
That makes no sense, you just said the information is in the manual.

Experienced Emacs users know that learning Emacs is an ongoing process.

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[bolega]

On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on.  The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.
>
> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.  The more userfriendly a
> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.  At least Emacs is
> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>

Rare pearls of wisdom ... from DK.

The new interface of office 2007 with tabs instead of pull-down menu
is a lot better in terms of visual throughput.

A wysiwig editor with a good markup or definition language can go a
long way to educate the user about the underlying features while at
the same time providing user-friendly convenience.

Things are certainly progressing in this direction.

I have not used LyX but I have heard that it is wysiwig with the
option of viewing code in various representations.

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[despen]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> despen@verizon.net writes:
>
>> Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Jul 7, 3:25 am, Jonathan Groll <li...@groll.co.za> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, this is something that I didn't realised until now, and have
>>>> been using emacs for a couple of years... and it is right there in the
>>>> manual under "basics of incremental search" too.
>>>
>>> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
>>> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
>>> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
>>> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
>>> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved
>>> in writing a emacs tutorial)
>>>
>>> this situation of us using emacs for 5 or 10 years and often found
>>> something basics we don't know about. I think that means there's
>>> something wrong with the manual.
>>
>> There's nothing wrong with the manual.
>> That makes no sense, you just said the information is in the manual.
>
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.

Well, he should say what he means.

:)

> In a way, it is a losing battle.

Many people will get to a level of proficiency and stop being curious.
I don't see a big problem, if they don't want to be power users,
so be it.
I think it's usually the same people that say they don't have
enough time to learn new things.

There are so many ways to access the "excellent manual" that it's
almost ridiculous.

One can type "^s ^h m" and get a whole lot of good info on isearch.
Some people will realize that they've got a whole screen full of
information and they should periodically go back and read it again
because the whole thing is not going to sink in at once.

WYSIWYG and usability (was: Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Peter Flynn]

bolega wrote:
> On Jul 8, 3:36�am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> In a way, it is a losing battle. �People expect software to just work
>> without reading manuals. �95% of all Word users, for example, create
>> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
>> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
>> and so on. �The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
>> better. �Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
>> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
>> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
>> order to get around that.
>>
>> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. �The more userfriendly a
>> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
>> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool. �At least Emacs is
>> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
>> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
>> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>>
> 
> Rare pearls of wisdom ... from DK.

Actually, DK posts a lot of wisdom, but not all is as quotable as the
above :-)

> The new interface of office 2007 with tabs instead of pull-down menu
> is a lot better in terms of visual throughput.

I'm not familiar with that term. The ribbon is an experiment in
interface usability (for doing which, Microsoft is to be congratulated,
regardless of the outcome, and regardless of whether you think the
ribbon better or worse than the old-style menus). Unfortunately it is
based on the tyranny of the majority: it's fine for the unthinking user
that David describes above; it is almost certainly suboptimal for his
"competent user".

> A wysiwig editor with a good markup or definition language can go a
> long way to educate the user about the underlying features while at
> the same time providing user-friendly convenience.

The majority of users don't want to be educated about underlying
features, or indeed about anything outside their field. They just want
the system to produce what *they* *believe* to be right, whether it
actually is right or not. As far as they are concerned, if it looks
pretty, it's right. The fact that it may be unusable, obsolete within
days, unreadable, or whatever, remains forever beyond them (oddly, even
when they have to pay to have it put right afterwards). Fortunately,
most of the material concerned is transient, ephemeral, or simply
unimportant.

However, in the middle (between those users and the "competent user")
there will be users willing to learn how to do it right and avoid
mistakes and unnecessary expense. But my own research is showing that
these users do still insist on a synchronous typographical interface
(what they call WYSIWYG, even when it's not, quite). What I am
attempting to measure is how far you can go towards retaining the visual
manipulation of the text before the interaction descends below the bar
of mutual second-guessing that David describes.

> Things are certainly progressing in this direction.

Yes, slowly.

> I have not used LyX but I have heard that it is wysiwig with the
> option of viewing code in various representations.

It's near-WYSIWYG. They describe it as WYSIWYM (Mean; implying conscious
intent). For users in my middle group above, who require Instant Textual
Gratification [tm :-], it's a valuable tool in that it has made it
clearer where some of the boundaries lie.

///Peter
-- 
(Followups set to c.t.t)

Re: Fixing antediluvianisms in Emacs' UI

[Ilya Zakharevich]

On 2010-07-08, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.

> In a way, it is a losing battle.

Why consider it in military terms?  The question at point is that
Emacs' UI is lacking.  So just fix it: make it self-documenting, as
any good-UI program should be...

Looks like some vestiges of 80s' mentality still remains in Emacs
design: at the time, a common misconception was that problems with UI
may be "fixed" by updating the manuals.  Well, even if one still
believes in this way, it is a dead end: Emacs' manual IS quite good
already, so the improvements achieved in this way would have a trace
value only.

Now, after the flood of "grandmother revolution" [*], we know OTHER
ways.  "Self-documenting" means the program guides the user how to use
it.  Emacs is now flexible enough so that with most tasks, this may be
easily achieved.

  [*] this is how as one of the designers of Plan9 called the major
      event of 90s: achievement of understanding of UI design so good
      that UI accessible to "grandmothers" may be created.  He
      attributes this breakthrough to effort of M$; I tend to agree...

> People expect software to just work without reading manuals.

That's right.  And when we can EASILY cater to their expectations, we should.

The question at point: ISearch.  Lemme sketch one possiblity of adding
self-documentation to ISearch (people with better UI-design experience
must be able to find something yet better):

  a) Change the prompt (configurable; verbose by default;
     self-documentation should mention how to disable verbosity):

		Isearch (F1 for help):

  b) bind F1 F1 to "Open manual on basics of Isearch";

  c) bind F1 to open a shrink-wrapped buffer with "Quick info" on
     ISearch.  This info should include the `current state' (case
     sensitivity etc) - plus information where this state "comes
     from": e.g., whether the particular setting is mode-specific.  It
     should also state how to toggle "I" in ISearch, toggle case-fold,
     switch direction, regexpness, by-word, different ways to quit,
     etc.

     Should also state how to start Isearch in `a particular state'
     (with some toggles pre-loaded).

Does not look difficult to do, does it?

Hope this helps,
Ilya

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Ilya Zakharevich]

On 2010-07-08, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on.  The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.

I suspect that you wanted to say that you find this situation
disagreeable.  Just think about that: would this opinion of yours
persist if Word had a clearly documented way to switch off guessing
(completely, and/or per particular heuristics)?

> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.

Partially, this is true.  But only at a small part (like M$'s
stupidity in not making the guessing optional).  The major thing which
you are missing is that the escalation also happens in `having people
get what they wanted in the first place' (usually "getting the work
done").  (Although users-conditioning-via-designer's-cluelessness also
takes place - hmm, this is just another way to state the same as you did...)

> The more userfriendly a piece of software becomes, the more this
> becomes a problem for _competent_ people willing to learn about
> their tool.

BS.  There is no direct connection.

> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation.

Just don't.  (Addressed in another message in this thread.)

Yours,
Ilya

Re: Fixing antediluvianisms in Emacs' UI

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org> writes:

> On 2010-07-08, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
>> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
>> In a way, it is a losing battle.
>
> Why consider it in military terms?  The question at point is that
> Emacs' UI is lacking.  So just fix it: make it self-documenting, as
> any good-UI program should be...
>
> Looks like some vestiges of 80s' mentality still remains in Emacs
> design: at the time, a common misconception was that problems with UI
> may be "fixed" by updating the manuals.  Well, even if one still
> believes in this way, it is a dead end: Emacs' manual IS quite good
> already, so the improvements achieved in this way would have a trace
> value only.
>
> Now, after the flood of "grandmother revolution" [*], we know OTHER
> ways.  "Self-documenting" means the program guides the user how to use
> it.  Emacs is now flexible enough so that with most tasks, this may be
> easily achieved.
>
>   [*] this is how as one of the designers of Plan9 called the major
>       event of 90s: achievement of understanding of UI design so good
>       that UI accessible to "grandmothers" may be created.  He
>       attributes this breakthrough to effort of M$; I tend to agree...

I'm not so sure grandmothers can use Microsoft programs so easily.
I sure cannot.

It seems to me that parangons of software explorability are more in
the camp of emacs, lisp and smalltalk.  Granted, this is archived so
far mostly by giving access to the sources, so not for grandmothers.
But then, Smalltalk was designed for grandchildren...



>> People expect software to just work without reading manuals.
>
> That's right.  And when we can EASILY cater to their expectations, we should.
>
> The question at point: ISearch.  Lemme sketch one possiblity of adding
> self-documentation to ISearch (people with better UI-design experience
> must be able to find something yet better):
>
>   a) Change the prompt (configurable; verbose by default;
>      self-documentation should mention how to disable verbosity):
>
> 		Isearch (F1 for help):
>
>   b) bind F1 F1 to "Open manual on basics of Isearch";
>
>   c) bind F1 to open a shrink-wrapped buffer with "Quick info" on
>      ISearch.  This info should include the `current state' (case
>      sensitivity etc) - plus information where this state "comes
>      from": e.g., whether the particular setting is mode-specific.  It
>      should also state how to toggle "I" in ISearch, toggle case-fold,
>      switch direction, regexpness, by-word, different ways to quit,
>      etc.
>
>      Should also state how to start Isearch in `a particular state'
>      (with some toggles pre-loaded).
>
> Does not look difficult to do, does it?

It's a lot of work if you have to do it manually for all the commands.
You must find a way to do it automatically.  We may require adding
declarations to commands, perhaps an improved interactive declaration?

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Xah Lee]

2010-07-10

On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> and so on.

that's called progress.

vast majority of people who makes a living by coding, don't know any
assembly language. They use scripting langs such as php, python, perl,
and probably a significant of them don't even know a language proper,
e.g. they are html, css, dreamweaver etc “coders”.

often there's complaint heard in the form of a sigh that sneer upon
the earlier generation, thinking they are uneducated and idiotic, but
quite the contrary. (slide rule vs electronic calculator, check vs
credit card use, hand writing vs type writer, type writer vs word
processor, ...)

> The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.

yes, there's something to be said about how much time people spend in
learning the tools well for their profession.

however, this must be differentiated from requiring users to
understand the implementation or the science behind things. Many tech
geekers unconsciously confuse this.

Also, if you take a look from the other side of the coin, although
say, the prototypical “Microsoft using idiots” create incredibly
crappy documents, but overall, the technology make it possible for a
thousand fold more people contribute to this world in diverse fields.
In fact, many of these “idiots”, are professors and scientists and
engineers, who have not studied about computing. (in a similar way, a
typical hardcore tech geeker, who can drilldown on tech detail of C, C+
+, Java, python, perl, lisp, tail recursion, monads, macros, pointers,
arrays, garbage collection, RFCs, etc and etc, but are a complete
idiot to fields of psychology, legal system, history, basics
economics... etc.)

personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
universities or large well known academic organizations. These
people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
their theories.

> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.  The more userfriendly a
> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.

This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
sigs.

It bears nothing to reality. It amounts to something equivalent to,
say, something as factual and meaningless as “the world has become
more dumb.”.

It's incredible how this mentality tickles the tech geekers, as we can
see already a bunch following heartily praising this summery. The
thought that easy-to-use or GUI based software creates a viscous cycle
of more idiots, is a pleasing thought to tech geekers.

Psychologists have studied this. In one example, different people
perceive different aspects of identical things. (e.g. flashing a
photo, and guys remember it as a photo of a beautiful chick, while
others don't remember there's a woman in it.) And or people will have
opposing conclusions given a identical article. (e.g. the leftist will
perceive a concrete evidence for leftist thoughts, while rightists see
concrete evidence of rightist thoughts (while the open source and or
“‘Free’ Software” camp see confirmation of the need for software
“freedom!”.)) People will defend to death their (irrational) beliefs.
The severe case is a form of self-deception, from beliefs in God to
politics to love relationships.

It has to do with protecting one's own mental image and with that
generating the juices for to go on. This may seem all illogical... but
you know how there's many personality disorders and psychological
illness and the phenomenon of mental breakdown? A gist of it is that
human animals are just not logical machines, the working of the mind,
the constituents to go on living, is filled with seemingly illogical
complications.

(personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
(fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )


> At least Emacs is
> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation.  Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>
> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
> can't deal with on their own.  And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
> become inclined to bother looking for help.


been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...

but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
many.

but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.

i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:

• Problems of Emacs's Manual
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html

i'll need to clean it up...

for a glimpse of the era of computing that emacs's manual was in, see:

• GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/gnu_emacs_xemacs_schism_Ben_Wing.html

• Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Uday S Reddy]

On 7/7/2010 3:28 PM, Xah Lee wrote:

> same here. I started to use emacs daily since 1998, and i didn't
> realize that Enter will exit the search and leave the cursor at the
> current location untill 2007 or so. I've always just used left/right
> arrow. (and a year or two later, i also found out that it is right in
> the manual. These happened only when i started to get more involved in
> writing a emacs tutorial)

You are unnecessarily demoting yourself, Xah Lee.

The original Emacs didn't use RET to end an incremental search.  My neurons 
tell me that it was ESC.  Typing a RET in the middle of an isearch meant that 
you wanted to search for a newline character.  But the manual said that you 
could basically type any Emacs command to end the search.  Since the ESC keys 
moved further and further away from the reachable keyboard real estate, people 
used various alternatives.  C-g was the most common.

The use of RET to end an incremental search is a relatively new feature, 
introduced in Emacs 19.  The NEWS.19 file says:

"**** The character to terminate an incremental search is now RET.
This is for compatibility with the way most other arguments are read.

To search for a newline in an incremental search, type LFD (also known
as C-j)."

You are not expected to re-read the manual after every new release, but you are 
expected to read the NEWS file.  Since we recently had a 
several-hundred-messages-long debate on the virtues of reading the NEWS file, I 
will just refer you to it.

Sorry for foiling this opportunity for you to attack the Emacs manual one more 
time.

Cheers,
Uday

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[B. T. Raven]

Xah Lee wrote:
> 2010-07-10
> 
> On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
>> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
>> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>>
>> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
>> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
>> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
>> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
>> and so on.
> 
> that's called progress.

Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
determined, dared, and done.

> 
> vast majority of people who makes a living by coding, don't know any
> assembly language. They use scripting langs such as php, python, perl,
> and probably a significant of them don't even know a language proper,
> e.g. they are html, css, dreamweaver etc “coders”.
> 
> often there's complaint heard in the form of a sigh that sneer upon
> the earlier generation, thinking they are uneducated and idiotic, but
> quite the contrary. (slide rule vs electronic calculator, check vs
> credit card use, hand writing vs type writer, type writer vs word
> processor, ...)
> 
>> The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
>> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
>> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
>> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
>> order to get around that.
> 
> yes, there's something to be said about how much time people spend in
> learning the tools well for their profession.
> 
> however, this must be differentiated from requiring users to
> understand the implementation or the science behind things. Many tech
> geekers unconsciously confuse this.
> 
> Also, if you take a look from the other side of the coin, although
> say, the prototypical “Microsoft using idiots” create incredibly
> crappy documents, but overall, the technology make it possible for a
> thousand fold more people contribute to this world in diverse fields.
> In fact, many of these “idiots”, are professors and scientists and
> engineers, who have not studied about computing. (in a similar way, a
> typical hardcore tech geeker, who can drilldown on tech detail of C, C+
> +, Java, python, perl, lisp, tail recursion, monads, macros, pointers,
> arrays, garbage collection, RFCs, etc and etc, but are a complete
> idiot to fields of psychology, legal system, history, basics
> economics... etc.)

Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
average sociology or psychology Ph. D.

> 
> personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
> professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
> universities or large well known academic organizations. These
> people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
> in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
> emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
> understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
> means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
> phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
> professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
> inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
> trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
> their theories.

If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
would be shown up as fools.

> 
>> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.  The more userfriendly a
>> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
>> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.
> 
> This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
> in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
> sigs.

The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.

> 
> It bears nothing to reality. It amounts to something equivalent to,
> say, something as factual and meaningless as “the world has become
> more dumb.”.
> 
> It's incredible how this mentality tickles the tech geekers, as we can
> see already a bunch following heartily praising this summery. The
> thought that easy-to-use or GUI based software creates a viscous cycle
> of more idiots, is a pleasing thought to tech geekers.
> 
> Psychologists have studied this. In one example, different people
> perceive different aspects of identical things. (e.g. flashing a
> photo, and guys remember it as a photo of a beautiful chick, while
> others don't remember there's a woman in it.) And or people will have
> opposing conclusions given a identical article. (e.g. the leftist will
> perceive a concrete evidence for leftist thoughts, while rightists see
> concrete evidence of rightist thoughts (while the open source and or
> “‘Free’ Software” camp see confirmation of the need for software
> “freedom!”.)) People will defend to death their (irrational) beliefs.
> The severe case is a form of self-deception, from beliefs in God to
> politics to love relationships.
> 
> It has to do with protecting one's own mental image and with that
> generating the juices for to go on. This may seem all illogical... but
> you know how there's many personality disorders and psychological
> illness and the phenomenon of mental breakdown? A gist of it is that
> human animals are just not logical machines, the working of the mind,
> the constituents to go on living, is filled with seemingly illogical
> complications.
> 
> (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
> being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
> Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
> personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
> personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
> logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
> experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
> done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
> besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
> On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
> circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
> Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
> the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
> be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
> (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )

This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.


> 
> 
>> At least Emacs is
>> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
>> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
>> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>>
>> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
>> documentation.  Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
>> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>>
>> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
>> can't deal with on their own.  And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
>> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
>> become inclined to bother looking for help.
> 
> 
> been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
> is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
> about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...

Boris Sidis, (Bill's father), a shrewd psychologist, thought, with good
reason, that IQ testing was dumb. I do, however, have solid evidence
that the X generation is more ahistorical than the Boomers, who, in
turn, tend to live in the moment.

> 
> but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
> documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
> measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
> use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
> for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
> logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
> structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
> many.

How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
question of who will evaluate the measurer.

> 
> but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
> well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
> 1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
> presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
> geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.

There are things more than two millennia old whose value just keeps
growing year by year. Since the philosophy and structure of the Emacs
documentation was so well thought out way back then, the texts just have
to be tweaked here and there to keep up with the evolution of the program.

> 
> i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:
> 
> • Problems of Emacs's Manual
>   http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html
> 
> i'll need to clean it up...

Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" cycle.


> 
> for a glimpse of the era of computing that emacs's manual was in, see:
> 
> • GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing
>   http://xahlee.org/emacs/gnu_emacs_xemacs_schism_Ben_Wing.html
> 
> • Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design
>   http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.html
> 
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> ☄

Ed

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Xah Lee]

On Jul 10, 4:25 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Xah Lee wrote:
> > 2010-07-10
>
> > On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> >> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
> >> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>
> >> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
> >> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
> >> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
> >> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
> >> and so on.
>
> > that's called progress.
>
> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
> determined, dared, and done.

you mean like this?

• World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics???
  http://xahlee.org/comp/WMSCI.html

and Larry Wall's post-modern stuff? like the following chantable
quote?

“The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
than the difference between theory and practice in practice.”

• Perl: Theory vs Practice
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_practice.html

and “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
Impatience, and Hubris.”, right?

• Larry Wall and Cults
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/larry_wall_n_cults.html

and the unix philosophy KISS right?

• The Nature of the Unix Philosophy
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_phil.html

> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.

so, you are saying, that some non-professionals actually have opinions
or insights that turn out to be more correct than the common theories
of the experts in particular field? I agree, and also agree that
sometimes cherry can be mistaken for banana, and female for male.
Though, what's the point?

My point that you were replying to, was about how tech geekers
ignorantly attribute laziness or stupidity to non-tech-geekers. And my
method used to convey this, is by a analogy, that indicates that
computing tech geekers are in general too idiotic about everything
other than computers. That, when you snear non-techies for their
cluelessness about using emacs or applications, you should look at the
mirror and think about how at this very moment those business people,
lawers, politicians, are laughing at you about how eternally-clueless
you are of basic social matters.

the reason i wrote in such a style and comparison, is due to, a
reaction from the idiotic style widely purveyed by the tech geekers,
as, if you will, a retaliatory refutation, which, mirrors and puts a
dagger right in the heart of matter. Did you enjoy reading it?

> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
> would be shown up as fools.

What about Einstein or Newton or Archimedes? How they fit in?

did you know that your dropping of names is not scholarly smooth? For
example, if you meant to mention what's considered the greatest, then
Godel and Knuth would not be up there. If you want to go by tech
geekers's fashion, then Gauss shouldn't be there.

y'know? we can turn this section to be more fruitful. Alas, whenever i
give it a start in that direction, tech geekers quickly drop out of
discussion, for lack of knowledge when dicussion gets a bit valuable.

For example, let's ask the question, of which we can have mutual
education: Who would be considered the top 20 computer scientist and
or programer? I don't really know the answer at all... but let's take
up the computer scientists case. At best i could maybe come up with 5
names off hand... and if pressed can come up with 10 names, but would
have no idea if the names would be say top 20 or so off that some of
them might be within top 100 instead.

however, this is certainly a valid question albeit non-scientific one.
And for a computer scientist (thousands of people quality), they
easily know the answer. So, let's grok... who among us can give us a
ball park list of people that might be roughly agreed among majority
of computer scientists that are the top 20 in the world in the past
100 years?

ok, let me try to pull off the top of my head as fast as i can type
without thinking or thumbing the web.... ok there's Knuth, and Guy
Steel of Scheme fame might be on it (after-thought: probably not (and
with Guy, there's probably the other 2 Sussman & co who co-write of
the Structure & Interp of Comptuer Programs books)), then Edsger
Dijkstra i think, then i think Haskell Curry (though not sure to what
degree logicians should be counted as computer scientists here), hum
ok probably a number of folks from the functional programing community
would get on the list, Dana Scott or something, and there's the
logician Quin something, and of course there's Turing who is gay and
got forced to eat a poisoned apple; here Alan Turing to tech geekers
is like Britney Spears to teens, every sophomoron knows and loves to
cite (same with Knuth), and with him there's Church... thinking of
this, then my fav author of all times B Russell. With Russell
mentioned, then Whitehead might deserve consideration. Humm, so the
train of thought quickly runs to the idea that the list of possible
names can easily be gotton by thinking with the math subjects of
functional lang's foundations, then grab the associated names of that
field, e.g. lambda calculus, symbolic logic, combinator theory,
recursion theory (recursion theory reminds me of Wolfram and Gospel
and Smullian and a gaggle from Martin Gardner circle
(• Martin Gardner (1914-2010)  http://xahlee.org/math/Martin_Gardner.html
)
), ... and broaden
it we can start to think of names associated with any finite/discrete
math, e.g. game theory, computational geometry, ... with game theory
there's the famous Conway... (and again the Martin circle Penrose,
Hofstadter... Rudy Rucker)

humm, of course there's a bunch of lang inventors, e.g. inventors of
java (gosgling and co), perl (Larry charlatan), python (Guido dummy),
tcl (the John something), c (3 or so major idiots with their “unix
philosophy” fuck ((Dennis co.) one particular i vaguely think is a
fuckface idiot from the unix gang is Rob Pike, with is unix KISS my
ass!)), c++ (bjormine moron), but these dumb asses prob won't even
make it to top 100. With that, i am thinking of all unix protocols and
tech and or before that, e.g. inventors of many networking protocols
e.g. the tcp/ip suite... but again prob i don't think any would make
it to top 20. (oh and there's the Ruby japanese guy M something, and
of course the lisp guy McCarthy i think he might make it to top 20,
then going on we can think about the Fortran, Pascal, Logo lisp,
Cobol, Ada, Basic... guys)

wheew.... my spade of typing is quite impressive! i think given a day
of web checking, i can probably come up with at at least 40 of people
who should be in the top 100.

do we have a working computer scientist here familiar with most field
of comp sci and can quickly give as a list? am sure such topic might
be brought up in computing journals or hist of comp sci books.

> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.

my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.

let me repeat, the “point” is meaningless chant. For example, what you
mean common denominator?? So, Pine, Pico, isn't common denominator?
How about BBEdit? and Linux's GUI Knight and Kate? hum? are they
supposed to be this common denominator?

also, why tech geekers always pull up a word processor to compare
with? What about Apple's X-code, tms's Visual Studio, and Java's
NetBeans and Eclipse? Mathematica's Notebook system? and there also
was Thick C, Code Warrior, etc on the Mac in the 1990s, and speaking
of that, on Windows there's Delphi IDE and quite a few others. Are
these, also idiotic, dumb, a vicious cycle of idiot begetting idiot?
What's a example of a editor that's not a idiotic viscous cycle? is it
vi and emacs?

if any tech geeker has pain in his ass and must mention that proper
IDEs shouldn't be compared to emacs, then there's BBEdit, Notepad++,
Notepad2, Textmate, NEdit, JEdit... quite a few. Are these, then,
belongs to the common denominator reposible for idiocy in society?

does non-idiotic practically mean something crass and
incomprehensible? So, unix, C++, and speghetti mudball are good,
right? Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, are kid's fuck that damage
society and idiot generating crap, right?

are the world's top 100 programers, am sure 95% of them don't use
emacs and will adamantly refuse to, are they, considered as idiots?
that they are too dumb to sit down and consume a beautiful manual as
emacs?

> > (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
> > being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
> > Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
> > personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
> > personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
> > logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
> > experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
> > done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
> > besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
> > On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
> > circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
> > Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
> > the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
> > be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
> > (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )
>
> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.

well the characters i had in mind are... the top 2 that portrait the
gist is of course Mr Spock and Mr Data. Then, there's Dr Lectur in
Silence of the Lamb, e.g. who can do things that threatens his life
without raising a heartbeat,... there are many many such chars in
films, i think i can easily list 20 off hand in 10 min but requires
too much typing and description... from psycho freaks to actors who
pull great heists to womanizers, liers... etc. The key is that these
mostly fictional characters has the ability to perform a action
without any emotional baggage that normal human beings have (fear,
anxiety, nervousness, cold heartedness... so on), and to various
degrees. (007 for example, usually have chars that fits such
description too ...)... serial killers, serial marriage money
grabbers, ...

> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
> question of who will evaluate the measurer.

when you measure, say, a dick, once the rules and methods are agree
upon, the question of the measurer isn't a question. Because, that can
be easily resolved in many ways.

> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...

hum? what is your point?  that i am wrong? that i might be wrong?  or,
are you indicating in anyway which side of argument you are on?? Or,
is the whole point being that i should reconsider?? If so, what are
the reasons?

Thanks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[B. T. Raven]

Xah Lee wrote:
> On Jul 10, 4:25 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
>> Xah Lee wrote:
>>> 2010-07-10
>>> On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
>>>> I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the
>>>> information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it.
>>>> In a way, it is a losing battle.  People expect software to just work
>>>> without reading manuals.  95% of all Word users, for example, create
>>>> their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without
>>>> having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets
>>>> and so on.
>>> that's called progress.
>> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
>> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
>> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
>> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
>> determined, dared, and done.
> 
> you mean like this?

Vide infra.

> 
> • World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics???
>   http://xahlee.org/comp/WMSCI.html
> 
> and Larry Wall's post-modern stuff? like the following chantable
> quote?
> 
> “The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
> than the difference between theory and practice in practice.”

And this is the insight to which we owe the Unix operating system.
Dos and Windows were other airplanes constructed while in flight, but by
less talented people.

> 
> • Perl: Theory vs Practice
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_practice.html
> 
> and “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
> Impatience, and Hubris.”, right?

No, all of those are vices in anyone.

> 
> • Larry Wall and Cults
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/larry_wall_n_cults.html
> 
> and the unix philosophy KISS right?
> 
> • The Nature of the Unix Philosophy
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_phil.html

I don't know if it's like that. I have no intention of looking at that.

> 
>> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
>> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
>> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.
> 
> so, you are saying, that some non-professionals actually have opinions
> or insights that turn out to be more correct than the common theories
> of the experts in particular field? I agree, and also agree that
> sometimes cherry can be mistaken for banana, and female for male.
> Though, what's the point?

The point is that what you call progress is in large measure nugatory.

> 
> My point that you were replying to, was about how tech geekers
> ignorantly attribute laziness or stupidity to non-tech-geekers. And my
> method used to convey this, is by a analogy, that indicates that
> computing tech geekers are in general too idiotic about everything
> other than computers. That, when you snear non-techies for their
> cluelessness about using emacs or applications, you should look at the
> mirror and think about how at this very moment those business people,
> lawers, politicians, are laughing at you about how eternally-clueless
> you are of basic social matters.
> 
> the reason i wrote in such a style and comparison, is due to, a
> reaction from the idiotic style widely purveyed by the tech geekers,
> as, if you will, a retaliatory refutation, which, mirrors and puts a
> dagger right in the heart of matter. Did you enjoy reading it?

No. I don't know any "tech geekers." Maybe you are referring to the
Emacs development team. In general I find their writing styles clearer,
more expressive, and less marred by solecisms than yours.

> 
>> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
>> would be shown up as fools.
> 
> What about Einstein or Newton or Archimedes? How they fit in?

They could be dropped in with Gauss and Goedel.


> 
> did you know that your dropping of names is not scholarly smooth? For
> example, if you meant to mention what's considered the greatest, then
> Godel and Knuth would not be up there. If you want to go by tech
> geekers's fashion, then Gauss shouldn't be there.

Why do you think you know what you're talking about?

> 
> y'know? we can turn this section to be more fruitful. Alas, whenever i
> give it a start in that direction, tech geekers quickly drop out of
> discussion, for lack of knowledge when dicussion gets a bit valuable.

You are attributing motives to people without any real insight into
their points of view. Maybe they drop out due to lack of enthusiasm for
educating you personally.

> 
> For example, let's ask the question, of which we can have mutual
> education: Who would be considered the top 20 computer scientist and
> or programer? I don't really know the answer at all... but let's take
> up the computer scientists case. At best i could maybe come up with 5
> names off hand... and if pressed can come up with 10 names, but would
> have no idea if the names would be say top 20 or so off that some of
> them might be within top 100 instead.

Yes, I believe you would have no idea. Neither would I but here's an
alphabet of some names I happen to recognize:

Aho, Aristotle
Babbage, Boole, Bell, Backus
Codd, Cerf, Church, Cray
Dertouzos, Dijkstra
Feigenbaum, Frege
Gelernter
Hamming, Hopper, Hollerith, Hoare, Huffman
Joy
Kernighan, Korn, Knuth, Kolmogorov
Lamport, Lovelace, Leibniz, Llul
McCarthy, McIlroy, Minsky, Mauchly
Naur, (von)Neumann
Pike, (van der) Poel
Ritchie, Rivest
Shannon, Stallman, Steele, Stroustrup, Sussman
Thompson, Torvalds, Turing, Tukey
Weinberger, Wolfram, Wirth
Yourdon
Zuse

> 
> however, this is certainly a valid question albeit non-scientific one.
> And for a computer scientist (thousands of people quality), they
> easily know the answer. So, let's grok... who among us can give us a
> ball park list of people that might be roughly agreed among majority
> of computer scientists that are the top 20 in the world in the past
> 100 years?

No one. Anyway, who cares?

> 
> ok, let me try to pull off the top of my head as fast as i can type

we didn't need to know that

> without thinking or thumbing the web.... ok there's Knuth, and Guy
> Steel of Scheme fame might be on it (after-thought: probably not (and
> with Guy, there's probably the other 2 Sussman & co who co-write of
> the Structure & Interp of Comptuer Programs books)), then Edsger
> Dijkstra i think, then i think Haskell Curry (though not sure to what
> degree logicians should be counted as computer scientists here), hum
> ok probably a number of folks from the functional programing community
> would get on the list, Dana Scott or something, and there's the
> logician Quin 

Quine

something, and of course there's Turing who is gay and
> got forced to eat a poisoned apple; here Alan Turing to tech geekers
> is like Britney Spears 

who is hot

to teens, every sophomoron knows and loves to
> cite (same with Knuth), and with him there's Church... thinking of
> this, then my fav author of all times B Russell. With Russell
> mentioned, then Whitehead might deserve consideration. Humm, so the
> train of thought quickly runs to the idea that the list of possible
> names can easily be gotton by thinking with the math subjects of
> functional lang's foundations, then grab the associated names of that
> field, e.g. lambda calculus, symbolic logic, combinator theory,
> recursion theory (recursion theory reminds me of Wolfram and Gospel
> and Smullian and a gaggle from Martin Gardner circle
> (• Martin Gardner (1914-2010)  http://xahlee.org/math/Martin_Gardner.html
> )
> ), ... and broaden
> it we can start to think of names associated with any finite/discrete
> math, e.g. game theory, computational geometry, ... with game theory
> there's the famous Conway... 

von Neumann is game theory; Conway is Game of Life (cellular automata).

(and again the Martin circle Penrose,
> Hofstadter... Rudy Rucker)
> 
> humm, of course there's a bunch of lang inventors, e.g. inventors of
> java (gosgling and co), perl (Larry charlatan), python (Guido dummy),
> tcl (the John something), c (3 or so major idiots with their “unix
> philosophy” fuck ((Dennis co.) one particular i vaguely think is a
> fuckface idiot from the unix gang is Rob Pike, with is unix KISS my
> ass!)), c++ (bjormine moron), but these dumb asses prob won't even
> make it to top 100. 

Even the top 100! Dumb asses! The top 1000 is a pretty elite group. Have
you checked the population of the world lately?


With that, i am thinking of all unix protocols and
> tech and or before that, e.g. inventors of many networking protocols
> e.g. the tcp/ip suite... but again prob i don't think any would make
> it to top 20. (oh and there's the Ruby japanese guy M something, and
> of course the lisp guy McCarthy i think he might make it to top 20,
> then going on we can think about the Fortran, Pascal, Logo lisp,
> Cobol, Ada, Basic... guys)
> 
> wheew.... my spade 

spate

of typing is quite impressive! i think given a day
> of web checking, i can probably come up with at at least 40 of people
> who should be in the top 100.

Vide supra.

> 
> do we have a working computer scientist here familiar with most field
> of comp sci and can quickly give as a list? am sure such topic might
> be brought up in computing journals or hist of comp sci books.
> 
>> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
>> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
>> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
>> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.
> 
> my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
> always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
> way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.

I am disrespectful of their goals, tactics, philosophy, sociopathy but
not the people. Unlike the Supreme Court, I don't think corporations are
people, just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.

> 
> let me repeat, the “point” is meaningless chant. For example, what you
> mean common denominator?? So, Pine, Pico, isn't common denominator?
> How about BBEdit? and Linux's GUI Knight and Kate? hum? are they
> supposed to be this common denominator?

You've gone off the road again. I'm trying to paraphrase what David
Kastrup wrote.


> 
> also, why tech geekers always pull up a word processor to compare
> with? What about Apple's X-code, tms's Visual Studio, and Java's
> NetBeans and Eclipse? Mathematica's Notebook system? and there also
> was Thick C, Code Warrior, etc on the Mac in the 1990s, and speaking
> of that, on Windows there's Delphi IDE and quite a few others. Are
> these, also idiotic, dumb, a vicious cycle of idiot begetting idiot?
> What's a example of a editor that's not a idiotic viscous cycle? is it
> vi and emacs?

More important, why did you change from "vicious" to "viscous" in mid
stream?

> 
> if any tech geeker has pain in his ass and must mention that proper
> IDEs shouldn't be compared to emacs, then there's BBEdit, Notepad++,
> Notepad2, Textmate, NEdit, JEdit... quite a few. Are these, then,
> belongs to the common denominator reposible for idiocy in society?
> 
> does non-idiotic practically mean something crass and
> incomprehensible? So, unix, C++, and speghetti mudball are good,
> right? Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, are kid's fuck that damage
> society and idiot generating crap, right?

I wouldn't put it exactly that way.

> 
> are the world's top 100 programers, am sure 95% of them 

How sure? What is the confidence level? More important, what does it
even mean for you to "be sure?" Assuming that the 100 could be
identified (by a secret ballot distributed among the top 10,000 say,
doubtful, though)what makes you think that they would not think it
beneath their dignity to answer a query about editor use? They're
probably busy people, not like you and I. ;-)

don't use
> emacs and will adamantly refuse to, are they, considered as idiots?
> that they are too dumb to sit down and consume a beautiful manual as
> emacs?

Not exactly idiots but certainly unimaginative, stubborn, possibly even
uninformed.

> 
>>> (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like
>>> being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi.
>>> Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn
>>> personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid
>>> personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful,
>>> logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my
>>> experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can
>>> done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and
>>> besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this.
>>> On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when
>>> circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion?
>>> Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on
>>> the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal
>>> be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such
>>> (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) )
>> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
>> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.
> 
> well the characters i had in mind are... the top 2 that portrait the
> gist is of course Mr Spock and Mr Data. Then, there's Dr Lectur in
> Silence of the Lamb, e.g. who can do things that threatens his life
> without raising a heartbeat,... there are many many such chars in
> films, i think i can easily list 20 off hand in 10 min but requires
> too much typing and description... from psycho freaks to actors who
> pull great heists to womanizers, liers... etc. 

Is "liers" in apposition to "womanizers?" If so, it should be "layers."
By the way, how can there be any such thing as too much typing?

The key is that these
> mostly fictional characters has the ability to perform a action
> without any emotional baggage that normal human beings have (fear,
> anxiety, nervousness, cold heartedness... so on), and to various
> degrees. (007 for example, usually have chars that fits such
> description too ...)... serial killers, serial marriage money
> grabbers, ...
> 
>> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
>> question of who will evaluate the measurer.
> 
> when you measure, say, a dick, once the rules and methods are agree
> upon, the question of the measurer isn't a question. Because, that can
> be easily resolved in many ways.

You seem to be reading all of this upside down. Why would anyone ever
measure a dick? In the real world responsible people have to ascertain
whether, for example, a prospective quality control technician even
knows how to use a micrometer. If so, does he/she appreciate the
importance of measuring what's relevant?

> 
>> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
>> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...
> 
> hum? what is your point?  that i am wrong? that i might be wrong?  or,
> are you indicating in anyway which side of argument you are on?? Or,
> is the whole point being that i should reconsider?? If so, what are
> the reasons?

The point is that David is right about criticizing M$' word processor
design philosophy and you are wrong, assuming you understand the issues;
otherwise you are not even wrong, just confused.

> 
> Thanks.
> 
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> ☄

Thank you.

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[David Kastrup]

"B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net> writes:

> The point is that David is right about criticizing M$' word processor
> design philosophy

I was not really criticizing it, merely pointing out the consequences of
an interface focused on shallow contact.  If you don't manage to keep
the corresponding problem space as shallow as the interface (and I don't
think that this is, in every case, impossible), then you get a conflict
of interest that get increasingly harder to solve.

I think that at one time at least Apple was renowned for restructuring
the problem space complexity to match their user interfaces, by no means
a trivial feat.

-- 
David Kastrup

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[B. T. Raven]

Xah Lee wrote:
> On Jul 11, 6:31 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
>>> my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
>>> always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
>>> way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.
>> I am disrespectful of their goals, tactics, philosophy, sociopathy but
>> not the people. Unlike the Supreme Court, I don't think corporations are
>> people, just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.

[...]


> you wrote:
>> just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.
> 
> You are ignorant of basic economics. I suggest reading Thomas Sowell's
> Basic Economics. I have some (lousy) notes here
> http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/jdini/basic_economics.html (if
> you are one of the free software proponent, who like to pirate things
> at night, i noticed that the audio version of Thomas's book is
> available free on the net thru bittorrent. Go grab it quickly before
> it got mercilessly regulated.)

I bought (for $30 or $40) it and read it a year or two ago. I agree that
it is must reading. Sowell has a hold of the elephant by one of its
larger appendages. I agree about that and some ergonomics issues that
you have broached, but about nothing in detail. The rest should be
passed over in silence....


> 
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> ☄

Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[B. T. Raven]

David Kastrup wrote:
> "B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net> writes:
> 
>> The point is that David is right about criticizing M$' word processor
>> design philosophy
> 
> I was not really criticizing it, merely pointing out the consequences of
> an interface focused on shallow contact.  If you don't manage to keep
> the corresponding problem space as shallow as the interface (and I don't
> think that this is, in every case, impossible), then you get a conflict
> of interest that get increasingly harder to solve.
> 
> I think that at one time at least Apple was renowned for restructuring
> the problem space complexity to match their user interfaces, by no means
> a trivial feat.
> 


Point taken. I never knew much about Word and, since I began using
OpenOffice to open doc files, I know even less. The animated paper clip
sent out bad vibes from the getgo.