Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?

[Elena]

On Dec 6, 11:40 am, Miles Bader <mi...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Elena <egarr...@gmail.com> writes:
> >> But I don't think I'm doing that. You used the term "rookie" for some
> >> reason (I don't know why), but most of the people I'm thinking of are
> >> really sort of in the middle -- they've certainly used VS for many years.
>
> > Years of usage do not equal years of experience.
>
> I mean "years of using VS to do serious programming on large projects."

My law still holds.

> >> > IDE users, OTOH, can just get along with what their IDE provides them.
>
> >> Only for the most trivial of tasks.
>
> > Well, if Emacs packages can't manage to accomplish such tasks in a
> > straightforward manner, then I would say such tasks are not trivial at
> > all.
>
> I've no idea what you're saying here.  I said nothing about Emacs.

Maybe there has been a misunderstanding: you were talking about impact
on problem-solving, I was talking about implementation.

> I'm saying that programming, by and large is mostly concerned with tasks
> that are fairly hard to automate, and that while IDEs may be able to
> help around the periphery, in the end, they do not really make the bulk
> of the task much easier.
>
> That doesn't make them _worthless_, but it does mean that it's misguided
> to place _too_ much emphasis on them.

I think the opposite is true.  Programming is heavily concerned by
drudge tasks, unless someone has come up with ways to automate them.
If I have to fiddle with lousy editing facilities, makefiles,
dependencies among projects, etc. then I have less intellectual and
time resources available when coping with the higher-level
abstractions.