From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Barry Margolin Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?" Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 15:38:11 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: <87y58pplcp.fsf@VLAN-3434.student.uu.se> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1375139179 19435 80.91.229.3 (29 Jul 2013 23:06:19 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 23:06:19 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Jul 30 01:06:22 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@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 1V3wWA-0000CF-AS for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 30 Jul 2013 01:06:18 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:56324 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1V3toM-0005xV-Aa for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Mon, 29 Jul 2013 16:12:54 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!news.kjsl.com!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!barmar.motzarella.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 63 Injection-Info: barmar.motzarella.org; posting-host="2be9e9f5dd9af768b8861af71b85fc28"; logging-data="16303"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/3+j2dxT9zbGIFXH2/CPBb" User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b3 (Intel Mac OS X) Cancel-Lock: sha1:vjAn6UinUb9oFV/C+1O+urYdnjA= Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:200252 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:92522 Archived-At: In article , Jambunathan K wrote: > Emanuel Berg writes: > > >> Remember he [RMS] is talking about secretaries in early days of > >> computing learning Emacs and learning programming in the > >> process. I am sure secretaries had no CS degrees and more > >> importantly they belonged to a period when computers were not > >> common place and were quite the cutting edge. I just laugh when > >> young kids in this day of Google complain that Emacs is > >> primitive and is difficult to learn. I consider it a joke. > > Welcome back! This time let's talk about Emacs! > > We are discussing - http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html > > What fascinates me in that article is this, > > ,---- > | They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend > | Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, > | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > | who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared > | ^^^^^^^^ > | ^^^^^^^^ > | off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things > | and they learned to program. > `---- > > The magic phrases are - "didn't say it was a programming" and > "believed". > > Belief or No-Belief, learning, stopping short of saying the whole truth > - all seem interesting to me. Do they help or hinder learning? Wasn't a similar phenomenon responsible for the popularity of PC spreadsheets? Businessmen were already familiar with doing spreadsheets on paper, and adding up rows and columns of data by hand. When spreadsheet software came out, no one told them they were "programming" when they put "SUM(A)" in a field and it totalled all the values in column A, so they didn't know they couldn't do it because they weren't programmers. However, this type of programming can usually only get you so far. Creating an init file that sets personal options (there was no "Customize" facility in those days), or puts together a sequence of a half dozen commands (like a keyboard macro -- I don't think the early versions had a way to save these) are pretty easy for anyone. When you start adding complicated conditionals, loops, etc., non-programmers get confused. You can see this kind of thing on a daily basis these days at Stack Overflow, where there are questions from hundreds of non-programmers trying to create web sites and database applications, when all they know about programming they learned by copying examples from web sites. You get SQL questions from people who don't even know what a JOIN is. -- Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***