Re: "like other editors" [was: Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete]

[Jai Dayal]

I'm confused as to why they conducted a poll in the first place.  Based on the audience (pedantic pseudo-scientists who are simply programmers and not scientists), it's obvious that the people who are against it will be hostile for the most trivial of reasons (hence, they are simple programmers not scientists).

No original functionality will be removed from emacs.  This is just a simple, logical, edition.  To insert a given character, say 'a', who actually highlights a block of text and types 'a'?  One simply moves the cursor to the location and presses 'a'.  This emacs 'feature' is illogical and useless, hence I strongly support the new editions.

But that's moot - the pedantic pseudo-scientists will simply bicker and create the most anecdotal and trivial use cases to justify their position.

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:18 AM, ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:

[Making this change] brings default Emacs behaviour close
to other modern text editors. ....

This is an invalid argument, more an appeal to fashion than an appeal to reason.  When switching from one application to another, we shouldn't expect the new one to behave just like the former one.  They are different pieces of software, after all.  When you start using different software, you should expect that it will operate differently.  You should expect that you'll have to learn new things.

Secondly, there are places in the world where people haven't ever used Windows; instead, their first and only experience with computers is with Linux.  What sense can it make to them that emacs' behavior is changed simply to mimic some other editor they've never seen or used?

I think that over the long term it will trend upwards that more people's first and only computer experience will be with FOSS.  So thinking ahead to those times, why should we alter the default behavior of Emacs to conform to a legacy editor?

Fourth, if we apply your argument to every difference between Emacs and (e.g.) Word, then we end up with Emacs behaving just like Word, and there being no difference between Emacs and Word.  Then we might as well just use Word. :/

Fifth, if we change emacs to comport with Word, and if in future Word changes the way it handles highlighted text to way emacs does now, should emacs then change back again, just to (again) follow the way Word works?

Finally, as said at the top, the argument to follow "other modern editors" is nothing more than an appeal to fashion.  And fashion is very subjective and capricious.  We should no more change emacs simply to comport with some other, even (currently) more popular software than you and I and all the other guys on this list should start dressing ourselves like the cool dudes on whatever soap opera is the most popular these days.

Let's just talk about what makes sense.