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.
>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.
I mean it literally starts with "What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea", and later calls them a "bagbiter". If you were responsible for the change, you would feel insulted. His basic point seems valid, but this is not a great way to present it.
Marc was an old school hacker, so bagbiter is a term of endearment, completely sanitized. "Chomp chomp!"
bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag."
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's lexiphage program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.
chomp: vi.
1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.
2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means ‘chomp chomp’ (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon Construction section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying “You chomper!” If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.
Marc also wrote RFC #748 documenting the Telnet Randomly-Lose Option on April 1, 1978:
IAC WILL RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS permission to, or confirms
that it will, randomly lose.
IAC WON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REFUSES to randomly lose.
IAC DO RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS that the receiver, or grants
the receiver permission to, randomly lose.
IAC DON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The command sender DEMANDS that the receiver not randomly lose.
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.
>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").
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.