Being constructive [Was: Nit-picking]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Eli!

On Sat Apr 12, 2008 at 01:30:27PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> [Moving this to emacs-devel, where it belongs.]

> > Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:35:59 +0000
> > Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>

> > > Perhaps it's just me, but there appear to be too many threads on this
> > > list that I need to skip entirely, due to their endless discussions of
> > > issues of miniscule importance.  OTOH, I don't remember any
> > > discussions of important new features for quite some time.  It almost
> > > looks like no important development is going on.

> > Down at CC Mode, I receive a constant trickle of "little" bugs, things
> > that go wrong in unusual (but perfectly reasonable) source code.
> > Languages like C++ and Java (and even C itself) are astonishingly
> > complicated.

[ .... ]

> > All in all, nothing very exciting or earth shattering - but important,
> > nevertheless.

> CC-Mode is a veteran feature.  I was rather talking about something
> radically new, like IDE-like features in CEDET and Semantic, or
> function signature and C++ class member tooltips.  (I'm not sure they
> are part of CC-Mode's scope, but just to give you an idea.)  These are
> great usability aids, IMO, and today's programmers expect to find them
> in any development environment.

I think these are the crucial things which are missing from Emacs.
The proprietary source code I deal with seems more and more to have
degenerated into amorphous unstructured messes of, perhaps ~20,000
smallish source files in a massive, straggling directory "structure" of
~2,000 directories.  etags doesn't work well here, with M-. taking many
seconds to find what is often not the right definition.  We need much
stronger code browsing facilities.  This is where other editors score
over Emacs.

Is Klaus Berndl still maintaining ECB?  Surely this is what we need.

> Elsewhere, there's lot of turf to be covered in the Unicode support
> department, like Unicode collation and line breaking, Unicode regular
> expressions, script properties, etc.  (See
> http://www.unicode.org/reports/index.html for more about these and
> other Unicode-related features.)  These all require extensive changes
> in core Emacs infrastructure and its main features, so how come all
> these changes are never discussed here, nor worked upon?  After all,
> Unicode support is the main new feature of Emacs 23, isn't it?

I think a lot of us, like me, are quietly beavering away at important,
but less exciting things.  Unicode support, for example.  (Well, it
doesn't sound that exciting to me.  ;-)

> If I think a bit more, I'm sure I will come up with a longer list of
> important developments that IMO should keep us busy for some time to
> come, instead of being bogged down in disagreement about how to paint
> the selected region.

Yes.  I also found those discussions very negative and a waste of time,
even though I certainly contributed my share of the negativity.  I agree
there is far too much bickering on the mailing list, and far too little
positive.

I think it would be psychologically very uplifting for each of us to
post, in a constructive non contentious fashion, what we are working on,
what we are trying to achieve, and so on.  This was exactly what my
previous post was meant to be.  Eli, could you possibly respond again to
that last post with a summary of what _you_ are working on?  We could
develop a very positive constructive thread from this.  :-)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).