Re: Speeding up Emacs load time

[Rustom Mody]

On Friday, July 19, 2013 10:54:21 PM UTC+5:30, Drew Adams wrote:
> The only ambiguity in pointing is the precision of the pointer (and
> your eye & hand).  If you do something other than point then you need
> to narrow things down in some other way until you have characterized
> the object you want uniquely.  That's a lot more complex in principle,
> and often in practice too.

And the lack of precision can be a bigger or smaller deal: replace mouse by gun 
and click by shoot.
If I were in William Tell's shoes I would prefer 10 decimal GPS coordinates to 
trusting my sharp-shooting skills :-)

Personally I find that the mouse hurts my hand and with a laptop touchpad I 
have terrible precision.

Of course all this does not change your basic point that 'direct' has a certain 
well directness that inference/thinking/calculation cannot compare with.

I believe that this argument has got somewhat derailed by the polemic: "mouse 
is stupid, keyboard is intelligent"

Leaving aside the fact that in real life mice are more intelligent than 
keyboards, I believe the real division here is between functional and OO 
interface rather than keyboard vs mouse.
A unix command-line or an interactive language prompt are examples of 
functional interfaces.
Conversely in windows when one points at something and the system magically 
opens with word or excel or whatever, that is an OO interface.

However clever emacs is, its unreasonable to ask it to know which file I want 
to edit.  Invert the order of file and program and encode some info into the 
extension and a system like windows gets it right... at least in the easy cases.

Not so for the not easy cases: If one is looking at a matrix M in some math 
software like mathematica, it again becomes unreasonable to demand that one can 
point to it and command DTRT!  Because we may be wanting inversion, or 
eigenvalues, or multiply by something else or a dozen other reasonably likely 
options.

IOW OO interfaces are intrinsically more dumbed-down than functional ones. 
Sometimes we need the intelligent interface, sometimes the dumb one.

tl;dr
Point-n-click by default with power-user command-line available on call seems a 
sensible option.  Starting an editor in lisp-interaction mode is perhaps 
natural only if your name spells 'rms' :-)