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Re: Emacs learning curve


From: Uday S Reddy
Subject: Re: Emacs learning curve
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:54:46 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Thunderbird/3.1

On 7/13/2010 1:18 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:

I'm glad you think like this. I have the impression that some prominent
hackers here think that it is a good thing and a show of distinction to
produce systems that require reading a manual and do quite a bit of
tinkering before usage. This is a symptom of the hacker's limitations,
of course. He implicitly acknowledges that designing the system on a way
that does not require that burden from the user was too much for him
(there is no derogatory intention towards any Emacs hacker here)

I think we are a bit past that stage in the Emacs world. [A historical throwback: when Emacs started, the reigning champion of the computing world was Unix. To use Unix, not only did you have to read its manuals and memorize them as much as you could, but also the manuals were ugly and boring. In contrast, the Emacs manual was readable and insightful and you didn't have to memorize more than what you had to. The manual was at your finger tips whenever you wanted to look up something. It was a great advance over the extant practice.]

The present Emacs allows you to do quite a bit without reading a manual. But unless you read the manual, you won't have the depth of understanding necessary to solve problems or to have a good mental model of what is actually happening. This is true not only of Emacs, but all other tools that are supposedly famous for being grandmother-friendly, i.e., Microsoft/Apple/Mozilla etc.

A few months ago, we had some users trying to switch from Thunderbird to VM. The biggest problem they had was that, when they deleted messages in Thunderbird they apparently disappeared. But when they viewed the same folders in VM, all those deleted messages came back! Well, they had a slash through them in the summary display but they were still there.

It took me some 10 minutes of digging through the Thunderbird manuals (the so-called "Knowledge Base") to find out that:

(a) Thunderbird doesn't delete messages when you delete them. It does a separate expunge either automatically or when you ask it to.

(b) The so-called "Trash" folder isn't actually recycle bin. So, you couldn't undelete messages by just going to it.

In fact, the Thunderbird knowledge base offered the rather innovative method of logging into the same IMAP account via a webmail system (imagine!) in order to undelete the messages that you might have accidentally deleted in Thunderbird.

Thus, in 10 minutes, I had more insight into what Thunderbird was doing than these habituated users that might have used it for years.

Literacy is a great advance for humanity, not because it makes us feel sophisticated, but because it is efficient for acquiring knowledge.

Cheers,
Uday




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