Re: line-move-visual

[Mark Crispin <mrc@panda.com>]

On Sun, 6 Jun 2010, David Kastrup posted:
> So you think that Emacs development should stop in order to save
> helpless end users from having new versions installed to them?

No.  I think that developers have a responsibility not to make changes to 
fundamental functionality.

> What makes you think that Emacs developers are responsible for end users
> subjected to restrictive administrations?

Any developer who does not feel responsible to the end users has no 
business being a developer.

> To a degree where you think heaping abuse on them is the right answer
> for your problems with authorities?

They deserve it when they do something that is abusive to the end users. 
Hopefully they learn from the mistake and not repeat it.

> What makes you think that Emacs developers are responsible for
> maintaining the rug of end users?

Any emacs developer who does not feel responsible for maintaining the rug 
of end users has no business being an emacs developer.

The open source community spent a long time trying to obtain credibility 
in the face of PHBs who claim that open source is "unreliable hacker 
code."  If it weren't for the intense efforts of the Ubuntus of the world 
to get stuff "ready for prime time", open source software would languish 
in obscurity.

Developers who pull antics such as changes to fundamental functionality 
destroy this hard-won credibility.

Don't kid yourself.  The opponents of open source are pushing back.  Part 
of the "embrace, extend, destroy" strategy of proprietary vendors is to 
attack open source as being "unreliable hacker code."

I have, in my collection of papers, a remarkable document which basically 
argues that nobody should run open source software because only 
proprietary software (which is "written by professional programmers") is 
trustworthy.  It's laughable, except when an open source developer does 
something irresponsible that make PHBs go "a-ha!"

There needs to be some soul-searching.  There are reasons why proprietary 
systems occupy the majority of end user platforms.  Not all of those 
reasons are due to vendor FUD.

Now, if it's a design goal that open source software be the exclusive 
tools of the elite, then perhaps it's alright to make unilateral changes 
to default functionality for everybody.  But in that case, don't expect 
the "l33t" to be more than a very small community.  Don't expect that your 
work will end up being particularly significant either.

Being a developer requires humility.

>>> Install a version of Emacs from the mid-1970s, and you get the
>>> behavior of Emacs from the mid-1970s.  What is so hard about that?
>> Have you done it?
> In the mid-70s?  No.

Perhaps you ought to be quiet when you don't have a clue.

> That's the point of time _you_ mentioned.

I referred to this incompatible change as being something that changed 
fundamental functionality that had been there since the 1970s.

You were the one who went off snidely about "install a version of emacs 
from the mid-1970s".

>> Do you have a clue as to what the task entails?
> Yes.

I doubt it.

>> Do you know what you made a completely idiotic statement?
> Well, _you_ were the one talking about the mid-70s.

Perhaps you ought to be quiet when you don't have a clue.

>> I can answer "yes" to all three questions.
> Congratulations.  Compiling and installing GNU Emacs before its
> existence is indeed an impressive feat.

I assure you that I compiled, installed, and used emacs in the mid-1970s.

Too bad that you are so lacking in a clue that you do not know that GNU 
emacs was not the first emacs.  Nor was it the second.  Nor even the 
third.

> You really don't want to start a dick size contest in these categories
> with me.

Sorry, I'm straight.  Look for your boyfriends someplace else.

> Oh, by the way: for somebody claiming to work with Emacs since the 70s,
> it is a somewhat unimpressive track record for Emacs to not contain a
> single code contribution by you.

This, coming from the same gnu.org people who claim credit for the work of 
others ("call it GNU/Linux"!), and have promised (for 30 years!) but never 
deliver on their new wonderful operating system that will have all the 
features of ITS.  Yawn.

Maybe, just maybe, people have other projects than a text editor.  Far 
more people use the work that I have done than have/will ever use emacs.

A text editor is not an end unto inself.  It is at best a means to an end. 
Very few people today use emacs for document preparation; that is not, nor 
has it ever been, its strength.

Since you asked, the UI principle of functional symmetry in which C-<x> 
operates on a character and M-<x> operates on a word was mine.  I had 
C-M-<x> operate on a sentence, but that was changed to S-expression early 
on when it turned out that nobody used the sentence operators and nobody 
defended those key bindings either.  I did this in my proto-emacs macro 
library (which predated emacs by about 6 months) and convinced RMS (it 
didn't take much convincing) that this was the way to go.

You can also thank me for things like file operators prompting for their 
value instead of putting you in a program minibuffer with a bunch of TECO 
(or LISP code) with the cursor at where you should type the file name. 
Once upon a time, most commands simply preloaded a minibuffer with the 
contents of the macro to do it.  It didn't take much argument from me to 
convince RMS on that matter either.  But I was the one who went and said 
that dumping the user in code in a minibuffer sucks.

I wrote some code in the original PDP-10 version, but I have long since 
forgotten what it was and it doesn't matter anyway since that code is 
extinct for all practical purposes.

emacs was the fusion of many people's ideas.  I would not presume to claim 
that I made a major contribution; it wasn't.  But it wasn't zero either. 
Probably those design elements would have happened anyway.  But they 
hadn't happened until I talked RMS into them.

Design elements live on.  GNU emacs' advantage was that it was a 
functional superset (substantial) of the PDP-10 version yet required no 
retraining for users of the old version.

More important, just about every program that calls itself emacs behaves 
in predictable ways on a certain basic set of command keys.  All of a 
sudden, GNU emacs has broken this by default.

It's as if someone were to decide that GCC should change "/" to get an 
APL-style reduce operator, since division is just multiplication by the 
inverse.  And, when a user complains, the developer says "if you don't 
like the way the current version of GCC works then install an older 
version."

> Do you really think you are in the best position to call the developers
> names?

When developers do something idiotic and irresponsible, it is perfectly 
proper to call them on it.

If you are the irresponsible idiot that make this change, then you deserve 
it.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.