Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

Xah Lee wrote:
> On Jul 10, 4:25 pm, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
>> Xah Lee wrote:
>>> 2010-07-10
>>> On Jul 8, 3:36 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> 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.  People expect software to just work
>>>> without reading manuals.  95% 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.
>> Maybe at the end of that "Road Ahead" there is the final Borgesian data
>> base that contains all possible compositions. Then if you want to write
>> a piece of expository prose arguing for the healthfulness of Twinkies,
>> you can just pick the document from a menu. Voila! Magnum opus
>> determined, dared, and done.
> 
> you mean like this?

Vide infra.

> 
> • World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics???
>   http://xahlee.org/comp/WMSCI.html
> 
> and Larry Wall's post-modern stuff? like the following chantable
> quote?
> 
> “The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less
> than the difference between theory and practice in practice.”

And this is the insight to which we owe the Unix operating system.
Dos and Windows were other airplanes constructed while in flight, but by
less talented people.

> 
> • Perl: Theory vs Practice
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/theory_practice.html
> 
> and “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
> Impatience, and Hubris.”, right?

No, all of those are vices in anyone.

> 
> • Larry Wall and Cults
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/larry_wall_n_cults.html
> 
> and the unix philosophy KISS right?
> 
> • The Nature of the Unix Philosophy
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_phil.html

I don't know if it's like that. I have no intention of looking at that.

> 
>> Some are, some aren't. From what I can informally grok, RMS for example,
>> displays a significantly higher level of general culture than the
>> average sociology or psychology Ph. D.
> 
> so, you are saying, that some non-professionals actually have opinions
> or insights that turn out to be more correct than the common theories
> of the experts in particular field? I agree, and also agree that
> sometimes cherry can be mistaken for banana, and female for male.
> Though, what's the point?

The point is that what you call progress is in large measure nugatory.

> 
> My point that you were replying to, was about how tech geekers
> ignorantly attribute laziness or stupidity to non-tech-geekers. And my
> method used to convey this, is by a analogy, that indicates that
> computing tech geekers are in general too idiotic about everything
> other than computers. That, when you snear non-techies for their
> cluelessness about using emacs or applications, you should look at the
> mirror and think about how at this very moment those business people,
> lawers, politicians, are laughing at you about how eternally-clueless
> you are of basic social matters.
> 
> the reason i wrote in such a style and comparison, is due to, a
> reaction from the idiotic style widely purveyed by the tech geekers,
> as, if you will, a retaliatory refutation, which, mirrors and puts a
> dagger right in the heart of matter. Did you enjoy reading it?

No. I don't know any "tech geekers." Maybe you are referring to the
Emacs development team. In general I find their writing styles clearer,
more expressive, and less marred by solecisms than yours.

> 
>> If Gauss or Goedel dared to sneer at someone like Donald Knuth they
>> would be shown up as fools.
> 
> What about Einstein or Newton or Archimedes? How they fit in?

They could be dropped in with Gauss and Goedel.


> 
> did you know that your dropping of names is not scholarly smooth? For
> example, if you meant to mention what's considered the greatest, then
> Godel and Knuth would not be up there. If you want to go by tech
> geekers's fashion, then Gauss shouldn't be there.

Why do you think you know what you're talking about?

> 
> y'know? we can turn this section to be more fruitful. Alas, whenever i
> give it a start in that direction, tech geekers quickly drop out of
> discussion, for lack of knowledge when dicussion gets a bit valuable.

You are attributing motives to people without any real insight into
their points of view. Maybe they drop out due to lack of enthusiasm for
educating you personally.

> 
> For example, let's ask the question, of which we can have mutual
> education: Who would be considered the top 20 computer scientist and
> or programer? I don't really know the answer at all... but let's take
> up the computer scientists case. At best i could maybe come up with 5
> names off hand... and if pressed can come up with 10 names, but would
> have no idea if the names would be say top 20 or so off that some of
> them might be within top 100 instead.

Yes, I believe you would have no idea. Neither would I but here's an
alphabet of some names I happen to recognize:

Aho, Aristotle
Babbage, Boole, Bell, Backus
Codd, Cerf, Church, Cray
Dertouzos, Dijkstra
Feigenbaum, Frege
Gelernter
Hamming, Hopper, Hollerith, Hoare, Huffman
Joy
Kernighan, Korn, Knuth, Kolmogorov
Lamport, Lovelace, Leibniz, Llul
McCarthy, McIlroy, Minsky, Mauchly
Naur, (von)Neumann
Pike, (van der) Poel
Ritchie, Rivest
Shannon, Stallman, Steele, Stroustrup, Sussman
Thompson, Torvalds, Turing, Tukey
Weinberger, Wolfram, Wirth
Yourdon
Zuse

> 
> however, this is certainly a valid question albeit non-scientific one.
> And for a computer scientist (thousands of people quality), they
> easily know the answer. So, let's grok... who among us can give us a
> ball park list of people that might be roughly agreed among majority
> of computer scientists that are the top 20 in the world in the past
> 100 years?

No one. Anyway, who cares?

> 
> ok, let me try to pull off the top of my head as fast as i can type

we didn't need to know that

> without thinking or thumbing the web.... ok there's Knuth, and Guy
> Steel of Scheme fame might be on it (after-thought: probably not (and
> with Guy, there's probably the other 2 Sussman & co who co-write of
> the Structure & Interp of Comptuer Programs books)), then Edsger
> Dijkstra i think, then i think Haskell Curry (though not sure to what
> degree logicians should be counted as computer scientists here), hum
> ok probably a number of folks from the functional programing community
> would get on the list, Dana Scott or something, and there's the
> logician Quin 

Quine

something, and of course there's Turing who is gay and
> got forced to eat a poisoned apple; here Alan Turing to tech geekers
> is like Britney Spears 

who is hot

to teens, every sophomoron knows and loves to
> cite (same with Knuth), and with him there's Church... thinking of
> this, then my fav author of all times B Russell. With Russell
> mentioned, then Whitehead might deserve consideration. Humm, so the
> train of thought quickly runs to the idea that the list of possible
> names can easily be gotton by thinking with the math subjects of
> functional lang's foundations, then grab the associated names of that
> field, e.g. lambda calculus, symbolic logic, combinator theory,
> recursion theory (recursion theory reminds me of Wolfram and Gospel
> and Smullian and a gaggle from Martin Gardner circle
> (• Martin Gardner (1914-2010)  http://xahlee.org/math/Martin_Gardner.html
> )
> ), ... and broaden
> it we can start to think of names associated with any finite/discrete
> math, e.g. game theory, computational geometry, ... with game theory
> there's the famous Conway... 

von Neumann is game theory; Conway is Game of Life (cellular automata).

(and again the Martin circle Penrose,
> Hofstadter... Rudy Rucker)
> 
> humm, of course there's a bunch of lang inventors, e.g. inventors of
> java (gosgling and co), perl (Larry charlatan), python (Guido dummy),
> tcl (the John something), c (3 or so major idiots with their “unix
> philosophy” fuck ((Dennis co.) one particular i vaguely think is a
> fuckface idiot from the unix gang is Rob Pike, with is unix KISS my
> ass!)), c++ (bjormine moron), but these dumb asses prob won't even
> make it to top 100. 

Even the top 100! Dumb asses! The top 1000 is a pretty elite group. Have
you checked the population of the world lately?


With that, i am thinking of all unix protocols and
> tech and or before that, e.g. inventors of many networking protocols
> e.g. the tcp/ip suite... but again prob i don't think any would make
> it to top 20. (oh and there's the Ruby japanese guy M something, and
> of course the lisp guy McCarthy i think he might make it to top 20,
> then going on we can think about the Fortran, Pascal, Logo lisp,
> Cobol, Ada, Basic... guys)
> 
> wheew.... my spade 

spate

of typing is quite impressive! i think given a day
> of web checking, i can probably come up with at at least 40 of people
> who should be in the top 100.

Vide supra.

> 
> do we have a working computer scientist here familiar with most field
> of comp sci and can quickly give as a list? am sure such topic might
> be brought up in computing journals or hist of comp sci books.
> 
>> The poster's point is that there is no hardwired repertoire of
>> thinkables and that any design template that posits such state of
>> affairs is doomed to become a strait-jacket. M$ is trying to please the
>> lowest common denominator, same as the pornographers.
> 
> my point is that this train of thought is bullshit, in particular
> always just to mention something about Microsoft Word, and like the
> way you did in a disrespectful way of writing Microsoft as M$.

I am disrespectful of their goals, tactics, philosophy, sociopathy but
not the people. Unlike the Supreme Court, I don't think corporations are
people, just legal fictions that have to be mercilessly regulated.

> 
> let me repeat, the “point” is meaningless chant. For example, what you
> mean common denominator?? So, Pine, Pico, isn't common denominator?
> How about BBEdit? and Linux's GUI Knight and Kate? hum? are they
> supposed to be this common denominator?

You've gone off the road again. I'm trying to paraphrase what David
Kastrup wrote.


> 
> also, why tech geekers always pull up a word processor to compare
> with? What about Apple's X-code, tms's Visual Studio, and Java's
> NetBeans and Eclipse? Mathematica's Notebook system? and there also
> was Thick C, Code Warrior, etc on the Mac in the 1990s, and speaking
> of that, on Windows there's Delphi IDE and quite a few others. Are
> these, also idiotic, dumb, a vicious cycle of idiot begetting idiot?
> What's a example of a editor that's not a idiotic viscous cycle? is it
> vi and emacs?

More important, why did you change from "vicious" to "viscous" in mid
stream?

> 
> if any tech geeker has pain in his ass and must mention that proper
> IDEs shouldn't be compared to emacs, then there's BBEdit, Notepad++,
> Notepad2, Textmate, NEdit, JEdit... quite a few. Are these, then,
> belongs to the common denominator reposible for idiocy in society?
> 
> does non-idiotic practically mean something crass and
> incomprehensible? So, unix, C++, and speghetti mudball are good,
> right? Visual Basic, Python, JavaScript, are kid's fuck that damage
> society and idiot generating crap, right?

I wouldn't put it exactly that way.

> 
> are the world's top 100 programers, am sure 95% of them 

How sure? What is the confidence level? More important, what does it
even mean for you to "be sure?" Assuming that the 100 could be
identified (by a secret ballot distributed among the top 10,000 say,
doubtful, though)what makes you think that they would not think it
beneath their dignity to answer a query about editor use? They're
probably busy people, not like you and I. ;-)

don't use
> emacs and will adamantly refuse to, are they, considered as idiots?
> that they are too dumb to sit down and consume a beautiful manual as
> emacs?

Not exactly idiots but certainly unimaginative, stubborn, possibly even
uninformed.

> 
>>> (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.)) )
>> This sounds like a bad attack of ADD. What's fascinating about Keanu
>> Reeves? Lieutenant Ripley is fascinating; Bishop is not.
> 
> well the characters i had in mind are... the top 2 that portrait the
> gist is of course Mr Spock and Mr Data. Then, there's Dr Lectur in
> Silence of the Lamb, e.g. who can do things that threatens his life
> without raising a heartbeat,... there are many many such chars in
> films, i think i can easily list 20 off hand in 10 min but requires
> too much typing and description... from psycho freaks to actors who
> pull great heists to womanizers, liers... etc. 

Is "liers" in apposition to "womanizers?" If so, it should be "layers."
By the way, how can there be any such thing as too much typing?

The key is that these
> mostly fictional characters has the ability to perform a action
> without any emotional baggage that normal human beings have (fear,
> anxiety, nervousness, cold heartedness... so on), and to various
> degrees. (007 for example, usually have chars that fits such
> description too ...)... serial killers, serial marriage money
> grabbers, ...
> 
>> How good (adjective) is the grammar? The nub of the matter here is the
>> question of who will evaluate the measurer.
> 
> when you measure, say, a dick, once the rules and methods are agree
> upon, the question of the measurer isn't a question. Because, that can
> be easily resolved in many ways.

You seem to be reading all of this upside down. Why would anyone ever
measure a dick? In the real world responsible people have to ascertain
whether, for example, a prospective quality control technician even
knows how to use a micrometer. If so, does he/she appreciate the
importance of measuring what's relevant?

> 
>> Or maybe even entirely rethink your position. "Cleaning" it up, as you
>> say, might just further implicate you in the "viscous" ...
> 
> hum? what is your point?  that i am wrong? that i might be wrong?  or,
> are you indicating in anyway which side of argument you are on?? Or,
> is the whole point being that i should reconsider?? If so, what are
> the reasons?

The point is that David is right about criticizing M$' word processor
design philosophy and you are wrong, assuming you understand the issues;
otherwise you are not even wrong, just confused.

> 
> Thanks.
> 
>   Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
> 
> ☄

Thank you.