From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Xah Lee Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:13:09 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <20100707064305.GF31621@groll.co.za> <20100707080139.GA18906@groll.co.za> <9dc07ed9-f6f1-4ac5-949a-5b97368cc32a@n19g2000prf.googlegroups.com> <87mxu22rbc.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1291844046 9555 80.91.229.12 (8 Dec 2010 21:34:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 21:34:06 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Dec 08 22:34:02 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1PQReE-0004hw-Dd for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:34:02 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:43127 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1PQReD-0002qB-C3 for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:34:01 -0500 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!a4g2000prm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp Original-Lines: 179 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.180.85.8 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1278785589 8509 127.0.0.1 (10 Jul 2010 18:13:09 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:13:09 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: a4g2000prm.googlegroups.com; posting-host=67.180.85.8; posting-account=bRPKjQoAAACxZsR8_VPXCX27T2YcsyMA User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.99 Safari/533.4, gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:179682 comp.emacs:100174 comp.lang.lisp:290173 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:76055 Archived-At: 2010-07-10 On Jul 8, 3:36=C2=A0am, David Kastrup wrote: > I think the point was that the manual was not deficient concerning the > information it provides, but in not making Xah Lee want to read it. > > In a way, it is a losing battle. =C2=A0People expect software to just wor= k > without reading manuals. =C2=A095% of all Word users, for example, create > their documents by mostly visual manipulation of their text without > having a clue about underlying structures like references, style sheets > and so on. that's called progress. vast majority of people who makes a living by coding, don't know any assembly language. They use scripting langs such as php, python, perl, and probably a significant of them don't even know a language proper, e.g. they are html, css, dreamweaver etc =E2=80=9Ccoders=E2=80=9D. often there's complaint heard in the form of a sigh that sneer upon the earlier generation, thinking they are uneducated and idiotic, but quite the contrary. (slide rule vs electronic calculator, check vs credit card use, hand writing vs type writer, type writer vs word processor, ...) > The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know > better. =C2=A0Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy= by > doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically", > second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in > order to get around that. yes, there's something to be said about how much time people spend in learning the tools well for their profession. however, this must be differentiated from requiring users to understand the implementation or the science behind things. Many tech geekers unconsciously confuse this. Also, if you take a look from the other side of the coin, although say, the prototypical =E2=80=9CMicrosoft using idiots=E2=80=9D create incre= dibly crappy documents, but overall, the technology make it possible for a thousand fold more people contribute to this world in diverse fields. In fact, many of these =E2=80=9Cidiots=E2=80=9D, are professors and scienti= sts and engineers, who have not studied about computing. (in a similar way, a typical hardcore tech geeker, who can drilldown on tech detail of C, C+ +, Java, python, perl, lisp, tail recursion, monads, macros, pointers, arrays, garbage collection, RFCs, etc and etc, but are a complete idiot to fields of psychology, legal system, history, basics economics... etc.) personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of universities or large well known academic organizations. These people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with their theories. > It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness. =C2=A0The more userfriendly a > piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for > _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool. This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their sigs. It bears nothing to reality. It amounts to something equivalent to, say, something as factual and meaningless as =E2=80=9Cthe world has become more dumb.=E2=80=9D. It's incredible how this mentality tickles the tech geekers, as we can see already a bunch following heartily praising this summery. The thought that easy-to-use or GUI based software creates a viscous cycle of more idiots, is a pleasing thought to tech geekers. Psychologists have studied this. In one example, different people perceive different aspects of identical things. (e.g. flashing a photo, and guys remember it as a photo of a beautiful chick, while others don't remember there's a woman in it.) And or people will have opposing conclusions given a identical article. (e.g. the leftist will perceive a concrete evidence for leftist thoughts, while rightists see concrete evidence of rightist thoughts (while the open source and or =E2=80=9C=E2=80=98Free=E2=80=99 Software=E2=80=9D camp see confirmation of = the need for software =E2=80=9Cfreedom!=E2=80=9D.)) People will defend to death their (irrational= ) beliefs. The severe case is a form of self-deception, from beliefs in God to politics to love relationships. It has to do with protecting one's own mental image and with that generating the juices for to go on. This may seem all illogical... but you know how there's many personality disorders and psychological illness and the phenomenon of mental breakdown? A gist of it is that human animals are just not logical machines, the working of the mind, the constituents to go on living, is filled with seemingly illogical complications. (personally, i have struggled with a quest to become a machine-like being, e.g. like those of mister Data or Spock in the StarTrek scifi. Been fret with this for some 20 years. Part of it is inborn personality, a inclination towards what's called a schizoid personality, and part of it is a quest to have the most powerful, logical, mind without emotion. It'd be a booklet to write about my experiences in this. (most tech geekers will probably think if it can done then wow that'd be great... (it's not what you think!)) (and besides a personal tale, there's also many scientific aspect of this. On the computer science side: can machines think? why yes or no? when circuits becomes sufficiently complex, will it develop emotion? Emergent phenomenon, complexity theories, cellular automata... and on the psychology/neuro-science side: is it possible for a human animal be totally emotionless? (note that many Hollywood movies depict such (fascinating!) character to various degrees.)) ) > At least Emacs is > at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to > the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up > on disk is that what they see on their screen. > > I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the > documentation. =C2=A0Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutor= ials > explaining the basics in most local languages. > > But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they > can't deal with on their own. =C2=A0And the more userfriendly Emacs becom= es, > and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people > become inclined to bother looking for help. been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot... but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so many. but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the 1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old. i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here: =E2=80=A2 Problems of Emacs's Manual http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html i'll need to clean it up... for a glimpse of the era of computing that emacs's manual was in, see: =E2=80=A2 GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing http://xahlee.org/emacs/gnu_emacs_xemacs_schism_Ben_Wing.html =E2=80=A2 Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.html Xah =E2=88=91 http://xahlee.org/ =E2=98=84