From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs. Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 10:44:09 +0900 Message-ID: <87fv5kfrfa.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <557F3C22.4060909@cs.ucla.edu> <5580D356.4050708@cs.ucla.edu> <87si9qonxb.fsf@gnu.org> <5581C29E.1030101@yandex.ru> <87r3p9fxm2.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <87k2v0fiji.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <20150619090225.GA2743@acm.fritz.box> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1434937487 16867 80.91.229.3 (22 Jun 2015 01:44:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 01:44:47 +0000 (UTC) Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Alan Mackenzie Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Jun 22 03:44:38 2015 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Z6qmq-00036S-Dr for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 22 Jun 2015 03:44:36 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:37779 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z6qmp-0007bO-AZ for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 21 Jun 2015 21:44:35 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:42977) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z6qmb-0007b9-US for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 21 Jun 2015 21:44:23 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z6qmV-0002zY-DA for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 21 Jun 2015 21:44:21 -0400 Original-Received: from shako.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.161]:50543) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z6qmU-0002wz-So; Sun, 21 Jun 2015 21:44:15 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by shako.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTPS id CE91B1C3889; Mon, 22 Jun 2015 10:44:09 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id A5D691A2CA2; Mon, 22 Jun 2015 10:44:09 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: <20150619090225.GA2743@acm.fritz.box> X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta34) "kale" 83e5c3cd6be6 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 3.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.161 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:187361 Archived-At: Alan Mackenzie writes: > Perhaps not, as such, but the phrase you used "... risk the wrath > of the ASCII-capped lobby?" sounds anything but respectful. I don't respect the ASCII-capped lobby. They constitute a tiny minority of humanity which has been getting in the way of bringing sane computing to 7 billion people for 5 decades now. I find the argument that "*I* am ASCII-capped, so *we* shouldn't simplify and disambiguate by using Unicode" especially distressing in the context of Emacs. > That's a red herring which has nothing to do with the current > argument about curly quotes. The inconvenience of typing curly > quotes is just as much an inconvenience to those who use > non-English keyboard layouts. That's nonsense. Emacs users learn *hundreds* of keychords. Learning a few more to be able to distinguish between ASCII GRAVE ACCENT and Unicode LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is not a huge inconvenience. If you don't need to do so, then simply map grave to the quotation mark and you're done. > I would imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) you use distinct keyboard > layouts for writing in English and Japanese. I imagine also that > there's no key on the Japanese layout either for either of the > curly single quotes. Japanese (and Chinese) mostly just use the layout of whatever keyboard is in front of them, except that it's convenient to have labelled keys for mode-switch commands for word processing users. The process of entering Japanese text has several levels for most programming users: 1. Keystrokes. These are ASCII keystrokes. 2. Keystroke pairs. Japanese phonetic writing is by syllable, not character. Each syllable is mapped to a pair of ASCII keys. 3. Dictionary lookup of phonetically entered words, resulting in a menu. Morphological and grammatical filtering to narrow the lookup results. 4. Selection from the menu. 5. Confirmation of the entered text. There do exist phonetic Japanese keyboard layouts, but almost nobody except a few professional typists use them. Excel formulas and such are easier to type in ASCII. Chinese is similar; as far as I know Chinese have no commonly used phonetic layout, they just use ASCII, but that's just a guess based on casual conversation with Chinese grad students. When Koreans use Han ideographs, the process is similar. When they don't, Hangul are composed characters but the process entirely algorithmic. I don't know if there are Hangul layouts in common use but I suspect it's more common than in Japan for several reasons. Bottom line: about 1.3 billion people write languages where the common practice is to type multiple ASCII characters per "native character". Most of the rest of the world has to switch layouts to get "self-insert-command" behavior for both ASCII and native characters. > Richard meant what he wrote here. Of course he did. The question is whether he has any experience with using input methods other than self-insert-command. I will bet "no", and that his reaction is pre-judgment without enough relevant experience. > Any benefits there may be are not _practical_ ones. The curly > quotes are a pain to type. That's a fixable bug, but not in the use of curly quotes themselves, but rather in the Emacs input system. > There are no practical benefits - nothing is made easier. Wrong. You evidently skipped over certain parts of Paul's and Stefan's posts where they describe objective benefits they expect. (You are welcome to disagree with them, presenting evidence to the contrary, but not ignore them entirely as you are doing here.) And your deprecation of readability and beauty *in sources as well as in help buffers* is unfair to those of us to whom it matters. You don't have to agree, but to me better readability and more beauty to not-yet-programmers are quite "practical" in education. > In a true experiment, comment and objections would be actively > encouraged at an early stage. On this subject, you can spell it "comment and objections", but in my experience what you get is "prejudice and hysteria". I see no reason to change that assessment for what has happened here. I've been through these battles a number of times, and the comment and objection stage is always just a waste of time and bandwidth. Nobody ever changes their mind based on so-called "rational argument"; the only actual result that ever happens is that implementation is always delayed, and often proponents give up entirely for a while. Which means nothing is learned. Experiments, on the other hand, do produce changes in position. Sometimes on the part of proponents, sometimes on the part of opponents. One reason you perceive these changes to be "not experimental in spirit" is because 90% or more of your programming life has been spent in an environment (no VC or CVS or Subversion) where reverting a change is practically a pain in the butt, as well as socially difficult. You've seen people fight reversion of their changes, and win because they refuse and it's pragmatically hard enough that nobody else is willing to do it. We need to get past that and create an environment where experiments are more frequent (and more frequently reverted). It's possible to do that now, although some social changes will be needed too.