Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

[Richard Stallman]

    [I seem to recall you making the point in the past that the polls are
    not so much a "vote" as a way to solicit reasoned arguments from a
    somewhat wider group than the regular developers.]

Yes, indeed.

    It seems like the usefulness of the results would depend very much on
    the nature of the question -- e.g., the results might be a lot better
    when you want the feedback of experienced long-time Emacs users (and
    it's OK for the results to be heavily biased in that direction), than
    when you want the opinion of the "mythical newbie" or even the average
    Emacs user.

What we find out from polls is whether significant groups of people
find a certain feature useful, and if so _why_ they do.
That enables us to find changes that won't cause problems for them
and avoid changes that will.

If we just speculate about this, we might be very wrong.