[CMake] Re: [Plug] Perspective

[Brandon Van Every]

On Jan 22, 2008 12:46 PM, Alvah Whealton <alvahw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 21, 2008 6:06 PM, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > With this kind of programming background, I don't see what the big
> > deal about a text editor is.
>
>     I was not at all gifted technically. I have learning disabilities
> and always struggled for everything I got.  But if one considers the
> ability to appreciate the significance of things and to experience a
> sense of wonder in things we encounter, I was perhaps blessed in that.

Ah, ok.  I'm pretty impatient, I often let myself be bored by things too easily.

> text
> processing in conjunction with email enabled me to escape isolation,
> and enabled me to make a number of significant and lasting friendships
> throughout the world.

The internet is cool!  It's usually what I turn to when I'm bored.
Half the time it's people that rejuvenate me.  The other half of the
time, information.  Really it's quite a remarkable step in human
evolution, to have so much access.

>    It is easy to  lose sight of how many people are still marginalized
> with respect to computers. The greater Linux community has the best
> chance of guiding a lot of elderly people, disabled people, and poor
> people to low cost computers, free software and a mentoring process
> which reflects genuine community values. And I have to believe, from
> my own experience, that what they stand to gain is not just a hobby
> but something which offers a means of enhancing their lives.  And so
> much of it is built on text processing.

Interesting proposition.  I agree about the community values, and it
seems people around here are willing to do the training.  I see
problems regarding documentation and ease of use.  These are problems
not just with Linux, but with Open Source generally.  I see emacs and
vi as instances of that problem.  Scite is better but I wouldn't
recommend it to a non-technical person.  It's still a technical text
editor, with most of the bells and whistles of emacs and vi.  It's
just a lot leaner and meaner.

Word processing is an easier problem as it tends to connote WYSIWYG
sensibilities anyway.  Lately I'm using AbiWord.
http://www.abisource.com/  It almost does what Word 2000 does, but
currently it requires outlines for table boxes, it can't just render
the contents of the boxes without an outline.  The latter is how my
resume is formatted, so I'm not free of Word 2000 yet.

I think there are some forces in the Linux universe, such as Ubuntu
and KDE, that are headed in the right direction regarding ease of use.
 They're just not quite there yet.  Ubuntu and KDE cultures are rather
different from emacs and vi cultures.

> > Now, thanks to the internet, any kid with technical ability has access
> > to HUGE resources.  Techies are incredibly empowered, and the
> > limitations are more systemic and cultural than technical.  Text
> > editing is now old hat.  Lots of conventions exist for GUIs that have
> > been pioneered by Apple and popularized by Microsoft.  Lots of
> > standard libraries to manipulate fonts are available.  From this
> > perspective, vi is a dinosaur that survives only because text shells
> > are still used.
>
> I certainly don't mean this to be offensive, but I think that
> perspective is a bit narrow. It allows for your creative needs, but it
> does not necessarily address the creativity of others.

I'd like to see the creativity of the vim community applied towards
easier to use software.  There's a lot of stuff out there that may be
personally creative and empowering, but is technically repetitive.

Some people are extreme in this regard.  For instance, I have a friend
who's autistic and rather gifted as far as his ability to sling raw
code.  But he's forever reinventing the wheel from scratch.  He has
seemingly no capacity to work with other people, build on what has
come before him, or contribute new value to techiedom.  He could
contribute *in theory* but he never sticks with his self-invented
works long enough to make them usable to anyone else.  He never deals
with problems according to what's easy for other people to use, only
what works for him.  So although I recognize his programming process
is very useful to him personally - it's his psychological maintenance
tool - sometimes I just want to pull my hair out about how generally
useless it is to others.

My autistic friend is an extreme instance of this.  I see vim as a
much lesser instance.  People use vim, no doubt about that.  But it is
a limited audience.  I think vi's popularity is driven mostly by the
installed base, not technical merit.  It takes a looooong time to
retire a tool when it's got a huge critical mass behind it.  For
Integrated Development Environment work it has already happened
though.  People use Eclipse, people use KDevelop, people use all kinds
of IDEs other than vim.  People even use scite.  The text editing
problem is probably not important enough for anyone to do anything
truly radical about it. Text editors will probably just float along
and eventually they'll all achieve a parity of popularity, since they
don't greatly matter.

> Of course,
> that is my opinion, only.  For me, the Linux community is about
> opening doors for creativity. It's about encouraging people to reach,
> to explore and to experiment. It's about encouraging people to develop
> and use their own judgments. It's about an OS that can accommodate
> varying styles and approaches.

Indeed, "I want thousands of options" is an endemmic problem in the
Unix universe.  Unix is very much a techie playground.  That has its
downsides: duplication of effort, less standardization, and not as
much energy put into ease of use.  "I want one option, or a few
options, that work well" is much more characteristic of the Mac /
Windows universe and it shows in the products.

> But my feeling is that in smaller
> segments of the community, like PLUG, there is much to be gained
> through mentoring, and encouragement, and enormous amounts to be
> gained from observing the "styles" of others, finding what makes them
> tick and taking advantage of the opportunity to gain from their
> knowledge. I find the acquisition of knowledge, whether about cutting
> edge tools  or arcane technology, to be a source for broadening my
> mind, creating perspective and tantalizing my sense of wonder.

That's cool.  Most of my plans are about world conquest.  :-)  Which
is the kind of impulse you need if you don't want to be shafted by
Microsoft *and* you want to compete head to head with them, not just
avoid them.

> Creativity and achievement are always deserving of my respect. They
> may or may not be reflected in the tools which are used, but in either
> case they certainly transcend the tools.   I would never look at your
> achievement and assume I knew better than you what your creative needs
> are. I would think that to be very disrespectful, and perhaps
> condescending. Certainly you deserve better than that.

I understand the sentiment, but when one has domain expertise, it's
not possible to always think thus.  I wouldn't be capable of designing
good software if I wasn't willing to judge and dismiss various things.
 Is Microsoft a paragon of creativity and achievement?  No it is not.
I don't respect their corporate dynamics.  They hire a lot of cynical
people who mill around and make mediocre to bad products.  Similarly,
I don't respect the dynamics of particular technologies or efforts.
For instance I don't have much positive to say about GNU Autoconf, and
there are legions of people who pull their hair out about that.  I'm
in the "get rid of Autoconf, migrate to something better" business,
that's how I make money.  It's not just a mercenary proposition, it's
an ideological commitment.  I believe open source can and should do
better from a technical design standpoint, and from a political
standpoint, I tire of the FSF cutting its nose to spite its face.

> Please take care,

You also!

Cheers,
Brandon Van Every