Re: Apologia for bzr

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lennart Borgman writes:
 > On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 9:28 AM, Eric S. Raymond <address@hidden> wrote:
 >> Richard Stallman <address@hidden>:

 >>> But even though we did not do anything wrong, it is unfortunate
 >>> for us nonetheless.  If it is possible to change Emacs to use some
 >>> standard modern terms instead of its current terms, it might be
 >>> worth doing, even if it means a series of renaming spread over a
 >>> period of years.

I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to rename the functions,
although it probably would help many potential developers, including
many who don't have a very good grasp of English and know "cut" as a
sound that describes a computer operation that has nothing to do with
knives or card tricks.  Rewriting the tutorial might be more
appropriate.

 >> Mostly there *aren't* any "standard modern terms",

You're getting too deep here.  I'm pretty sure what's under discussion
is cut vs. kill, paste v. yank.

 >> because there are no other editors in which there is so much
 >> decoupling between the local equivalents of our core concepts that
 >> they need to be described separately.

True of buffer, I guess, but not of window vs. frame.

 >> There's a parallel with git jargon here...

Indeed.

 > It is very different in one way. An editor is a tool you start
 > with.

That's not what Eric's talking about.  The point he is making, it
seems to me, is that Emacs is not an editor, it is a text editing
environment or toolkit.  Similarly, git is not a VCS, it is an
environment for developing a VCS.  Not to the same extent that today's
Emacs is a development environment for editors, but then Richard had
several years of experience with using a editor language to create the
Emacs Lisp and GNU Emacs that is the direct ancestor of today's Emacs.