The reason for i didn’t update the blog yesterday is: I’m a little exhausted The cause for that is, again, the ever energy draining emacs.
i got to know it when taking the data structure course of Zhu Zhongtao in Tsinghua. He is crazy for emacs and he was demonstrating it in the class room everyday. For a long time I worship those hardcore hackers. I myself also spent a lot of time in it. But now I ask myself: what is the advantage emacs gave me in helping me SOLVING PROBLEMS?
It helps when occasionally I need to ssh into a unix/linux server or linux embedded system(Well, most embedded systems can’t afford emacs by the way).
It provides me something for everything so I don’t need to spend the hell lot of time to find and install and maintain a tool every time I try a new language.
Multi-window and multi-frame sometimes help.
But that’s All. Don’t tell me how cool it is to spend a whole lot of effort to make emacs assist you in browsing and programming object oriented source. Don’t mention your long precious .emacs file to make gnus working for gmail plus rss plus whatever. Don’t even mention your newest achievements on adding various panels and windows for emacs: it’s born for command line.
Why the hell should I spend that much time to know so much details of a software in order to use it? It just makes no sense. Stallman did a pretty good job in writing this software. But why should users all over the world to go through the effort he spent on this? Look at
the new group of emacs. It contains often the most messages. And most people are just asking how they can tweak their chars and buffers in emacs one way or another. Isn’t it obvious useless repetition?
Why the hell should people put so much effort in enabling old emacs-lisp to deal with everything? Lisp IS out-dated for application development in graphics window and internet era. And it IS so again the wisdom of unix to try to do everything not so well in one program.
It’s a tragedy for programmers to adherent to one software, one os, one platform in such a degree. The only thing a programmer should adherent to is problem solving, which, require in its natural, constant adaptation and pursuit for new things.
I’ll still use emacs as a better replacement of notepad. (Not even sure if it’s better than gedit in some cases.) And that’s all. Adios, Zhongtao.
Emacs is like Stallman. They are all tragedy figures to me in that they were born pioneers, and uncompromisingly moved to their goals only to become the hindrance in the trend at last.
So many pioneers end up like that by the way…