Category: computers

Emacs Weenie

UPDATE: Steve says in the comments that he wrote this when he was “hammered.” It should be taken in that spirit. :) Very understandable.

Effective Emacs

The key to understanding Emacs is that it’s all about _efficiency_, which includes economy of motion. Any trained musician will tell you that economy of motion is critical to becoming a world-class virtuoso. Any unnecessary motion is wasted energy and yields sloppy results.

Using the mouse is almost always the worst possible violation of economy of motion, because you have to pick your hand up and fumble around with it. The mouse is a clumsy instrument, and Emacs gurus consider it a cache miss when they have to resort to using it.

Compared to Emacs Wizards, graphical-IDE users are the equivalent of amateur musicians, pawing at their instrument with a sort of desperation. An IDE has blinking lights and pretty dialogs that you can’t interact with properly (see Item 6), and gives newbies a nice comfortable sense of control. But that control is extremely crude, and all serious programmers prefer something that gives them more power.

I love emacs, but I hate rants like this. If this guy really cared about efficiency, he would have learned what interface specialists like Tog have known for eons: that keyboard shortcuts *feel* faster, but mouse motion *is* faster, empirically. I started reading this hoping for cool emacs ideas and I got to this paragraph and thought, “guess this guy prefers advocacy to facts.” After all, if he was all about economy of motion, wouldn’t he be using vi? No triple buckys!

If there was any question of this guy doing anything but chest-thumping, you could just read on to:

You don’t need a menu bar. It’s just a crutch placed there for disoriented newbies. You also don’t need a toolbar with big happy icons, nor do you need a scrollbar. All of these things are for losers, and they are just taking up precious screen real-estate. Turn them all off with the following code in your .emacs file:

“For losers”?

I can’t believe this made it to the front page of Reddit. Must be the LISP wankers.

Playa Hatin’

UPDATE: Entry has been deleted. Poor guy musta got overwhelmed by rubyists pointing out the error of his ways. Feel kinda bad for him. Something similar happened to me once.

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Well, it’s begun. The extreme Ruby buzz is bringing out angry, ignorant hating from Pythonistas.

Let me sum up the article for you: “Ruby isn’t like Python or Lisp. It’s more like Smalltalk and Perl. Waaaaaah.”

Yeah, almost as if it were primarily inspired by Smalltalk and Perl.

Stupid buzz.

Detailed rebuttal here, containing most of the points that leapt to my mind when I read the Eel thing.

LMMS Review

So I’ve been checking out LMMS, and it pretty much delivers as promised: “easy music production for everyone.”

Imagine something with capabilities somewhere between a classic “soundtracker” application and something like GarageBand, but super easy to use, and preinstalled with a big pile of useful samples.

It’s quite awesome.

It took me a bit to figure out how to use it because there’s basically zero documentation, but the complexity is miles less than that of comparable programs designed for high end/professional type users.

I threw together a silly little beat demo song in no time. (Warning: it’s a tuneless little electrobeat thingy.)

It can’t do everything in the world but what it can do is easy and fun and accessible.

Kudos!

I would like to insert here an “I hate linux sound” rant — I wanted to use a LMMS beat and record a ukulele tune with it, with Audacity, say — but I couldn’t figure out how to record anything in Audacity on Linux without adding an ugly, nasty burbling effect, presumably because Audacity on Linux isn’t yet hip to ALSA, the advanced linux sound architecture, “advanced” in this context meaning “not horribly sucky and broken.”

Guess I’ll be doing all my recording on OS X.

LookLater

LookLater A commenter on my and Joe’s gaming blog pointed me at a neat service he created, “Looklater,” intended for quickly oookmarking things you want to go back and read later. Kind of a private del.icio.us but without tags and with some other spiffy features. Very interesting little ajax bookmarklet interface! Not Safari compatible though.

But then these days I’m even using Firefox on the mac.

M-J Dominus: “Why Lisp Won’t Win” — Still Applicable?

Mark-Jason Dominus on “why lisp won’t win”:

Here’s the real reason why Lisp won’t win. The Lisp programmers don’t want it to win. They’re always complaining that not enough people are using Lisp, and that Lisp isn’t popular. But they humiliate and insult newcomers whenever they appear in the group. (The group regulars would no doubt respond to this that the newcomers deserve this, because they’re so stupid and argumentative.) If Lisp did become popular, it would be the worst nightmare of the comp.lang.lisp people.

Ow!

This is from 2003. Now in 2005 there exist things like Practical Common Lisp, which seems to be all of the lisp and none of the attitude.

And we have Reddit.com, where — I counted — one fifth of the current stories on the front page are about Lisp or Scheme, some of them very old stuff (the classic Scheme textbooks, “How To Design Programs” and even more classic, “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” are both front page items as I write this.)

Could it be that there has been some kind of transformation in the last year or two in the classic Lisper attitude?

Is it just me or is there a crazy huge Lisp buzz these days? It could just be that I read Reddit a lot and it’s run on lisp and backed by Paul “Lispmonster” Graham.

BTW, I found “Why Lisp Won’t Win” on Reddit’s new page. It was one of two further lisp links that hadn’t yet been promoted to the front page. (The other was this one.

I’m betting those will shoot to the front page too soon. Lisp posting seems to be as easy a formula for Reddit popularity as Microsoft bashing has classically been for Slashdot popularity.