Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".

>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.

>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.

>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.

>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.

>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.

>Grr.

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.

>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.

>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.

>Surprise. Grr.

▲ em-bee 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i don't know that crispin rant sounds pretty reasonable to me. it's not insulting and the argument is coherent. he has a point.

	▲	DonHopkins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Theo's rant about what a hypocritical idiot ESR is also sounds pretty reasonable to me: he has a good point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883342 ESR's free to make ridiculous laws about eyeballs that aren't true and nobody follows while never actually reviewing any code himself (except for the climate scientists' code which he totally misunderstood and dishonestly misrepresented), but blaming it on Linus was a dick mode. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Climategate >During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.) porridgeraisin: Speaking of ICCCM (aka I39L) and X11 selections, have you seen David Rosenthal's glorious rant about the Sun Desktop that somebody leaked to the unix-haters mailing list (who, moi?), which comes straight from the author of the ICCCM and co-developer of Andrew, X10, X11, and NeWS. The Roy Lichtenstein line is classic. What he's touching on by "Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously?" is Mark Weiser's "Ubiquitous/Calm Computing". He's married to Mark's widow Victoria Reich, and they both work on LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045304 PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall. Check out his blog, recently he's been writing about his introduction to computer graphics, hacking late at night in the basement of the lab on the PDP-7 connected to the Titan at Cambridge University, and how Coprophagia Is Bad For You! He was employee #4 at NVIDIA. https://blog.dshr.org/ >We managed to get the game to be sort-of playable provided you let the machine win.

▲ porridgeraisin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Another classic. About the X11 selection mechanism

https://github.com/porridgewithraisins/x11cp/blob/main/rant