[UFO Chicago] New Linux Website

[Nate Riffe]

Just now Ian Bicking made 15 LEDs in my apartment flash with this:
> On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 07:15, Nate Riffe wrote:
> > Of course people have preferences.  What's that got to do with
> > arguing them to death?
> 
> Every specialty has a set of items or techniques that are essential,
> and to which the specialist specifically adapts -- and just like
> technologists, they have endless debate over it.  We aren't so
> special.

Yes, the merits of various text editors and their use within our
specialty are probably worth discussing and I don't dispute that.
However, this is not a discussion of the merits of various text
editors:

> > > > > > I knew when I discovered that Mandrake had XEmacs and no
> > > > > > GNU Emacs that I was in the house of the Devil.
> > > > >
> > > > > You should have ordered the exorcism as soon as you found
> > > > > any version of emacs at all.
> > > > 
> > > > Why do powerful editors needs to be destroyed?
> > > 
> > > Because they seek dominion over people with simple needs.  They
> > > must be crushed before they can enslave the world.
> > 
> > Anybody with "simple needs" has no need for unix.
> 
> I see, so instead of pico/nano I should be using Windows Notepad.
> Glad that we have that cleared up.


At best, I might describe this as sniping, and I'm going to go out on
a limb and say that I think that people engage in it because they are
afraid that their editor of choice might not be The Best Editor In The
World, but are so steeped in its idiosyncracies that they could never
try the others to find out.  I'm going to make a comparison to auto
racing.  Go to the Indianapolis 500 and you'll a couple dozen cars
that are all basically the same shape and go about the same speed, but
have engines and other parts made by different manufacturers.  The
main difference between them is the driver.  Maybe some driver has
only raced in one car with a particular Ford engine, and he could
never win a race in a car with a Mercedes engine simply because he
isn't familiar with its power curve and doesn't know when to switch
gears.  Maybe there's another guy who's just the opposite.  These two
guys are exactly analogous to Jordan with Emacs and Jesse with vim.
Yes, they could probably drive each other's cars, but they could not
win races in anything other than their own.  Therefore they swear by
their car, and the engine in it, without even considering the
possibility that the other engine might be just as good, only
different.  Dale Earnhart is dead now, and so is this thread.

-Nate

-- 
--< ((\))< >----< inkblot@movealong.org >----< http://www.movealong.org/ >--
American currency is neither red, white, nor blue.
pub  1024D/05A058E0 2002-03-07 Nate Riffe (06-Mar-2002) <inkblot@movealong.org>
     Key fingerprint = 0DAC F5CB D182 3165 D757  C466 CD42 12A8 05A0 58E0