Re: What does 'run' do in cperl-mode?

[Xah <xahlee@gmail.com>]

On Jul 28, 8:32 pm, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:
> > From:XahLee<x...@xahlee.org>
> > Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:54:35 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > After all, many emacs developers read here i was told.
>
> Most of them don't, actually.  Whoever told you otherwise was wrong.


thanks for setting this correct.

... wait, but it was you who told me so here few months back i think.
But nevermind. :)


> And your ``problems'' are actually features as far as most Emacs
> developers are concerned.  The fact that Emacs behaves almost
> identically on all platforms is considered by most Emacs developers
> (and by many users) a virtue, not a disadvantage.  Lennart is in
> minority here.

I don't see my suggestion for emacs to adapt the “Alt+‹key›” notation
should be classified as a “feature”. Between Feature and Bug, i'd say
it's a bug, if forced.

Remember, in my article

“Emacs's M-‹key› Notation vs Alt+‹key› Notation”
 http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization_meta_key.html

The main reasons i gave are:

• Universally understood
• Identical To Key's Label
• Meta is Alt in practice
• Keyboards don't have Meta key today

So i consider it more as bug report now i think about it. Why? Because
emacs failed to update itself when its keyboard under lisp machines
become obsolete.

As i mentioned, the computing industry changes relative fast.

(tech geekers wants to think: Fashion! FAD! No, stop that. Sure
there's fashion and fad, for example i consider eXtreme Programing,
Programming Patterns, Universal Modeling Lang, fashion and fads that
does us no good. But we are not talking about fahsion and fad here.
Also, what's you consider fashion and fad may actually turns out
fundamental in human progress. For example, the commercializing of the
web, with estores and ebay and paypal and all, in the late 1990s. Many
hardcore techgeekers, will admantly shout STUPIDITY. Same has been
said about blogging, css, javascript, cookies, and today many tech
geekers hold contempt for things like youtube.

(actually i wrote about this yesterday in comp.lang.lisp, here's a
excerpt: (as a example of a characteristic thought pattern of these
people... one can image they are the type of guys who said computers
should never adopt the mouse (~1990), GUI (~1990), the web should not
commercialize (~1995), web should not have cookies (~1997), css or
javascript (~1998), source code should never have syntax coloring (mid
1990s), blogging is for teens (early 2000s), Wikipedia is for morons
(~2004). In their quite strong opinion, these type of features or
changes are a waste of computing cycle, fad, or for kids or dumbing
down society, when these things were in their early days and their
future is not certain.)  ) )


> And your ``problems'' are actually features as far as most Emacs
> developers are concerned.  The fact that Emacs behaves almost
> identically on all platforms is considered by most Emacs developers
> (and by many users) a virtue, not a disadvantage.  Lennart is in
> minority here.

In my suggestion, i suggest that emacs should one single version that
works on any OS with the same emacs-UI. (as opposed to, one conforming
to Mac OS X, another for MS Windows.) You perhaps misread me there.

Yes, Lennart is a minority. I dunno what's his prob.

Oh, another point i wanted to make before, was that OpenSource
software often takes a 5 to 10 years lag of adopting features from the
commercial wold.

Syntax coloring, for example, i think by 1995 is in every commercial
software. (when did it came to emacs?)

Mouse support...

Font ...

Unicode ...

GUI support ...

I'm actually don't have solid historical facts for the above points as
i liked... but anyway i just want to write instead of like doing 10
years of research and post 1 article and got overflooded.

well the point is that, many of these features often gets laughed and
sneered at by some hardcore guys. But in the end, the goodness, as
determined by society, every body, dummies or not dummies, decides
what becomes the norm. So, linux started to adopt just about Windows
UI wholesale in 1998, with, of course, wide decryment from tech
geekers on how it shouldn't be, how it is dumbed down.

Today, after 10 years, of various distros and Lindows etc trumpeting
on how easy it is to use, linux is still struggling to enter much of
market share with Windows or Mac, but now you'll encounter hardcore
tech geekers who will break his head in telling you how EASY linux is
to use now, that all “difficult” is in the past only. (he dreams!)

Ok, the point i want to make, is that make of these tech geeekr's
attitude, is just wrong. Not rational. Granted, sometimes i, too,
often sneer and mistake important something to be fad. For exampl,
when Instant Messaging just began in 1999, by such as AOL. I was like,
never really thought about it but if asked, i think it's for teens.
Well, one coworker asked me to sign on at work, and i was rather
displeased about it but did, because it was to discuss work related
issues. (i'm in CA, she's in KS) Then after the initial month of using
it with some thought of distaste, i find it's quite fun. I mean, you
can chat to ohter girls. Never the less, i didnt think too high of IM.
Still consider it some type of teen fad i wouldn't want to associate
myself with.

But after a few years, say by 2004, or now 2008, you do realize that
IM in fact has made a significant social impact. I'm no socialologist
by training, but if you ask a sociologist who studies technology's
role in human history, i'll bet IM is one of the significant tech that
had made impact in how we human animals lived or worked.

okie, i think i started to write too much. better stop now.

So back to emacs.... there was CUA mode. I don't know the history of
the mode, but it is my guess that mode has been floating out there for
quite some time before it is part of emacs. I think there must be huge
resistance back then, even today, the use of it is somewhat
controversial, and geekers are shy to admit they use it because that
somehow makes them “Microsoft Kiddies”.

lookking at the CUA mode source, i see it started in 1997.
When is it bundled in emacs? Let's say in 2000.
Now, when is copy cut paste using xcv keys standard across mac and
windows? prob around 1995 with the popularity of Windows 3.x. From
1995 to 2000 is like 5 years. Took emcas 5 years to adapt, yet not
even complete because it's not default but just Optional (very
extreemly stupid).

y'know, unix geeks and hardcore geeks like to have options. one
hundred options. Like in unix tools, you have 100 options, each
overstep another. In Window Manafers under X before KDE/Gnome days,
each has one million options. It's all about setting up, learning,
experimenting, so you are not a Microsoft Kiddie.

Ok, perhaps a summary about my points. One is that tech geek often
think irrationally. They didn't analyze things from a broad, long term
social perspective, and they have a tendency to prefer the nature
nature of “hard to use”, because that intuitively makes them more
manly.

The other point is that if you research the adaption of GUI features
or practices in commercial and free software world, you'll see that
the free camp is rather slow in 5 to 10 years. If a free soft kept out
and didn't adapt gui things, it basically falls out of use and becomes
obsolete. Contrast firefox vs lynx. Emacs in fact is a good example.
Nobody uses it. lol. Yet we still have tech geekers here wnts to kill
it completely.

alright, i typed fast. this post is maybe 50 min but now it flies out
sans cleanup. I have written much better about all these points
actually, but citing my website gets tired and ignored. Better answer
question on person to person basis, is what am trying to do.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄