Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 06/23/2015 06:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> It's also true that I've expressed an *opinion* that the costs to a
> relative few are small compared to potential benefits for many.
> Obviously, the opponents disagree about the balance.  When opinions
> differ, shouldn't we go get some actual facts?

Someone should also clearly state the benefits, and to what they are 
attributed.

There's not too much value in having curly quotes appear directly in the 
source file. Maybe they'll appeal to aesthetics of some subset of Elisp 
programmers, whereas a lot of others will just be surprised. We could 
also reach the same effect with font-lock, with extra flexibility, and 
without the need to change the substitute-command-keys API (and support 
it forever thereafter).

As Andreas mentioned before, not every native English speaker is 
accustomed to them, and certainly not most of the people for whom 
English is not a native language.

> Of course it's possible to go too far.  What's the appropriate
> balance?  I don't know.  I think *this* experiment is a very
> conservative one.  Try it and see, *then* oppose the feature if
> appropriate.  If that works (that is, provides useful information
> leading to consensus, which might be to keep or to revert the
> feature), more progressive experiments may be justified.

Anyone interested in "trying" it can check out the current Emacs sources 
and type curly quotes in docstrings to their heart's content. There's 
not much to see or evaluate there.

> [2]  Emacs is an organization of professionals, even if it can't
> afford to pay them market rates.  And it certainly can't afford to pay
> HCI experts.  It just has its reasons for avoiding the experiments
> needed to get good information about usability of UI changes, and so
> falls back on "logical thought about the changes".  Disclaimer: I
> believe that those reasons are valid, but they are weaker today than
> ever before, and the conservatism should be relaxed.

It would take quite a bit of conceit to assume that Emacs can make 
better choices WRT to docstring markup syntax than virtually every 
programming language and documentation format out there.

We're not even competing with other editors here.