Re: Rapidly navigating buffers using search

[Xah Lee]

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.

vast majority of people who makes a living by coding, don't know any
assembly language. They use scripting langs such as php, python, perl,
and probably a significant of them don't even know a language proper,
e.g. they are html, css, dreamweaver etc “coders”.

often there's complaint heard in the form of a sigh that sneer upon
the earlier generation, thinking they are uneducated and idiotic, but
quite the contrary. (slide rule vs electronic calculator, check vs
credit card use, hand writing vs type writer, type writer vs word
processor, ...)

> The result is unmaintainable crap, but they would not know
> better.  Word tries keeping up in this battle of computer illiteracy by
> doing things like enumerations, styles and so on "automagically",
> second-guessing the user, and the user tries second-guessing Word in
> order to get around that.

yes, there's something to be said about how much time people spend in
learning the tools well for their profession.

however, this must be differentiated from requiring users to
understand the implementation or the science behind things. Many tech
geekers unconsciously confuse this.

Also, if you take a look from the other side of the coin, although
say, the prototypical “Microsoft using idiots” create incredibly
crappy documents, but overall, the technology make it possible for a
thousand fold more people contribute to this world in diverse fields.
In fact, many of these “idiots”, are professors and scientists and
engineers, who have not studied about computing. (in a similar way, a
typical hardcore tech geeker, who can drilldown on tech detail of C, C+
+, Java, python, perl, lisp, tail recursion, monads, macros, pointers,
arrays, garbage collection, RFCs, etc and etc, but are a complete
idiot to fields of psychology, legal system, history, basics
economics... etc.)

personally, i'm a friend with many older generation mathematician
professors, who are run conferences or are chairman or presidents of
universities or large well known academic organizations. These
people's IQ, are above than i'd say 99% of hardcore emacs developers
in entire emacs history. These people, won't even be able to grok what
emacs is actually used for. It'd be hard pressed for them to
understand what a embeded scripting language in a application really
means. In fact, most won't even try. Here we can actually see a
phenomenon that might be interesting to tech geekers. In many
professional mathematicians's minds, programers are considered
inferior brainers, that programing field is something considered
trivial, a mere matter of some typing and dicing and fidgeting with
their theories.

> It is an escalation of mutual cluelessness.  The more userfriendly a
> piece of software becomes, the more this becomes a problem for
> _competent_ people willing to learn about their tool.

This train of thought, is prototypical of tech geek thinking. It comes
in a chantable form too that we often see these idiots put in their
sigs.

It bears nothing to reality. It amounts to something equivalent to,
say, something as factual and meaningless as “the world has become
more dumb.”.

It's incredible how this mentality tickles the tech geekers, as we can
see already a bunch following heartily praising this summery. The
thought that easy-to-use or GUI based software creates a viscous cycle
of more idiots, is a pleasing thought to tech geekers.

Psychologists have studied this. In one example, different people
perceive different aspects of identical things. (e.g. flashing a
photo, and guys remember it as a photo of a beautiful chick, while
others don't remember there's a woman in it.) And or people will have
opposing conclusions given a identical article. (e.g. the leftist will
perceive a concrete evidence for leftist thoughts, while rightists see
concrete evidence of rightist thoughts (while the open source and or
“‘Free’ Software” camp see confirmation of the need for software
“freedom!”.)) People will defend to death their (irrational) beliefs.
The severe case is a form of self-deception, from beliefs in God to
politics to love relationships.

It has to do with protecting one's own mental image and with that
generating the juices for to go on. This may seem all illogical... but
you know how there's many personality disorders and psychological
illness and the phenomenon of mental breakdown? A gist of it is that
human animals are just not logical machines, the working of the mind,
the constituents to go on living, is filled with seemingly illogical
complications.

(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.)) )


> At least Emacs is
> at its heart and in most of its modes a WYSIWYG system with regard to
> the actual file contents: regardless of the crap people do, what ends up
> on disk is that what they see on their screen.
>
> I have no idea what to do to make people lean towards looking at the
> documentation.  Emacs has a help menu, and those also point to tutorials
> explaining the basics in most local languages.
>
> But people look at documentation mostly when they run into problems they
> can't deal with on their own.  And the more userfriendly Emacs becomes,
> and the better its menus and interactive helps become, the less people
> become inclined to bother looking for help.


been writing already long... so i'll cut short here. All of the above
is actually not exactly revalent here. We can go on philosophizing
about whether people are getting more dumb or whatnot...

but the issue here is the quality of emacs's documentation. A
documentation, has a quality. This quality can be measured. It can be
measure in many ways, depending on your purpose. e.g. how good is the
use of the english language in coveying information? how easy is it
for readers to understand? how impeccable is the style with respect to
logicians? How well is the grammar? How well are the over-all
structure organized? will people LIKE the manual? ... so many and so
many.

but in short, here's one thing to consider: i think emacs manual is
well written (generally speaking), but it is largely written in the
1980s. The bulk of it, the organization, the style of what things are
presented, the verbosity of the words to convey a idea, ... are all
geared in the computer of a era 2 decades old.

i wrote something about this aspect, it can be seen here:

• Problems of Emacs's Manual
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_manual_problem.html

i'll need to clean it up...

for a glimpse of the era of computing that emacs's manual was in, see:

• GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/gnu_emacs_xemacs_schism_Ben_Wing.html

• Keyboard Hardware's Influence on Keyboard Shortcut Design
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄