Re: basic question: going back to dired

[Tim X]

"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

> Tim X wrote:
>> "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Tim X wrote:
>>>> Bastien <bzg@altern.org> writes:
>>>>> Those who say "Hey! The learning curve is too high." are those
>>>>> who don't really want/need Emacs.
>>>> Exactly. Well said. 
>>>
>>> I thought Bastien was joking there. Maybe I was misunderstanding, but when
>>> people complains about the learning curve I believe they are mostly saying
>>>
>>>   "Hey! The learning curve in Emacs is to high. It did
>>>    not take that long at all to learn to do the same thing
>>>    in the other programs I tried."
>>>
>>
>> I don't agree. My experience with people learning emacs isn't that the
>> learning curve is too steep for the things they do with other programs,
>> but rather that the learning curve is steep because there is so much
>> more functionality to learn. The basics of emacs don't really differ
>> that much from any other editor. 
>
> I think the learning curve on Windows for Emacs is much steeper. There are
> much more details to consider.
>
>> For the record, I was agreeing with his point about concentrating on
>> extending functionality rather than worrying about terminology so
>> much.
>
> I agree to that point too.
>
>> I think the real source of issues regarding terminology is actually more
>> a reflection of laziness.
>
> It might be true in some cases, but please be careful when using such
> statements. The laziness may equally well be in your side in that you do
> not try to understand all details well enough when it comes to why some
> things matter.
>
and you tell me to be careful about statements! You know nothing of me
or what I have done to assist others learning or anything else, so don't
make assumptions about how much or little I've worked to understand the
issue. 

For the record, my comment on laziness is based on the observation that 

1. The majority of people who I've assisted, either directly or via
forums like this newsgroup have, when asked, admitted they have not read
the manual or run the tutorial because they couldn't be bothered or
don't like reading manuals. That to me is essentially laziness - they
would rather send a question to this group than bother doing the work to
find out for themselves. 

2. On a number of occasions, when someone has claimed they are having
trouble because of the unusual terms used and you ask them to explain or
identify in what ways the manual faq and tutorial are inadequate in
explaining things so that they can be improved, they either cannot
provide any examples or they admit they have not read them. Again,
failure to read the supplied documentation or try to find the answer is
essentially laziness in my book. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au