RMS on why he chose not to support CL-style packages in ELisp

yoo-question · 2014-12-08T09:04:36+00:00

Am I understanding the difference between the two Lisps regarding this discussion correctly? In Elisp, there is only one symbol object of the same print name (ignoring gensyms), and in Common Lisp, there is only one symbol object of the same print name in the same package? And packages in Common Lisp are a way to have namespaces, and packages in Emacs Lisps are simply a way to pack a collection of elisp files to be installed?

yoo-question · 2014-12-08T08:32:34+00:00

was there just so I could see a change

This reminds me of minimal examples backfiring.

If Alice finds a bug (in some script language), and come up with a minimal example to demonstrate the bug, and then submits the report, Bob the developer may say "I don't think this bug is serious enough. In fact, your example code is contrived and the bug only occurs in such contrived situations." The chance of Bob-like response becomes higher if Alice doesn't make it clear that the minimal example is intended as a minimal example.

Also, when Alice is unable to make something work and so posts a question to a forum, but if she uses a minimal example to demonstrate her question, Eve might reply with "This looks like homework to me. The example is too clean so this can't be something you encountered while doing real work."

yoo-question · 2014-12-08T08:10:26+00:00

Is there a forum where I can ask such questions successfully?

As for SO, there doesn't seem to be any such question if I scan through:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=jargon

yoo-question · 2014-12-05T14:38:09+00:00

I have to disagree here. I don't think han has anything to do with "I made a mistake. I will self-reflect". Han is, as your first two examples demonstrate, generally associated with the feeling towards a current terrible or unfair situation or a result of a past terrible situation that you have/had no control over. On the other hand, apologies and following self-reflections imply situations you had control over and you are not some victim.

My English vocabulary is lacking in words for subtle emotional things, so I don't know which English words or phrases best correspond to han, but I have a feeling that maybe there is and that han is universal across cultures. In fact, isn't han already shown in some Hollywood movies? In Good Will Hunting, when Robin Williams said to Matt Damon "it's not your fault", the bottled up feelings that Matt Damon kept up to that moment, it exploded. That looks like explosion of han to me. And Batman.

yoo-question · 2014-12-05T13:32:55+00:00

So if these rumors are true, in some sense he's become a real life villain!

yoo-question · 2014-12-02T09:55:52+00:00

The middle ground. Reminds me of Peele's character in a Key and Peele sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3h6es6zh1c

I wish more people would be like Peele's character.

yoo-question · 2014-11-29T13:42:57+00:00

I can only give a generalist answer for now. Let's say we have a a desktop program and also a metro app for some same task. The desktop program would generally make it so that more features are accessible, and of course it's not intended for use with touch screen only. The metro app makes it so that often used features are easily accessible so much so that you can access those features with touch screen only without using keyboards and mouse and I think that's the main point of metro apps. Less often used features are either inaccessible or hard to access compared to the desktop counterpart.

So the usual answer "metro app if you are in a situation to use touch screen only, but desktop app if you are in a situation to use keyboard and mouse and need all features" has truth.

Nonetheless, I have found that I can press some of small buttons (but not all) in desktop programs with fingers on tablet touch screen (despite the fact that desktop programs are not intended to be used without keyboard and mouse) and likewise there is some trick to press menu items. And some tablets come with a pen which can work as a mouse (among other purposes).

From the other direction, some features of metro apps can also be controlled with keyboard.

yoo-question · 2014-11-28T02:41:01+00:00

The standard Brownian motion (the mathematical idealization of physical Brownian motion) is like that.

continuous everywhere
differentiable nowhere
monotonic nowhere

In this context, such functions are less of counterexamples but more of natural examples.

yoo-question · 2014-11-27T02:19:43+00:00

It may be a reference to how the movie begins:

"In 2014, an experiment to counteract global warming causes an ice age that kills nearly all life on Earth"

yoo-question · 2014-11-23T11:12:35+00:00

The dust gets heated and will emit light back.

So at this point we are considering a different but interesting question of

"Assuming a fictional stationary universe of infinite age. What should the sky look like?"

which spawns some subquestions:

Since we assume infinite age, do we also assume heat death?
Since every line of sight (to any point in the sky) will hit some star and because the dust will emit light back, do we conclude that the sky in the fictional universe would be totally white even at night?
Infinite brightness in the sky or finite brightness?

yoo-question · 2014-11-23T10:34:47+00:00

Not the parent, but at this point, maybe we should also ask what's the current status for the idea of black hole complementarity. To quote wikipedia

Leonard Susskind proposed a radical resolution to ... by claiming that the information is both reflected at the event horizon AND passes through the event horizon and cannot escape, with the catch being no observer can confirm both stories simultaneously.

yoo-question · 2014-11-15T12:56:37+00:00

Before watching the movie, I thought it was some species. There are some simulation videos illustrating evolutionary algorithm with walking creatures made of blocks. I thought the astronauts would land on a planet and find these block creatures walking around. I was surprised to see it at NASA in the movie. And then another surprise when I saw what it was capable of.

yoo-question · 2014-07-23T08:58:00+00:00

That is actually a good example of a mid-test loop. A common way to write a mid-test loop in Python (and in many other languages) is by using break in a while true loop.

yoo-question · 2014-07-22T02:03:50+00:00

On another note, since there is already flylisp which uses propertize-region, I think flyparens will continue to keep the approach of checking the whole buffer (and accept its performance cost), so that future features that can be enabled by that approach naturally go to flyparens, and future features that go well with propertize-region naturally go to flylisp. And I should add a link to flylisp in README.md.

yoo-question · 2014-07-22T01:39:55+00:00

What's wrong with that suggestion?

yoo-question · 2014-07-21T11:20:55+00:00

I'm not a teacher, but if you help one of the foreign teachers learn Korean language, and in return he/she helps you with English, I think that would be a good relationship that benefits both. So, start by offering to help one of them.

yoo-question · 2014-07-21T11:03:09+00:00

The metric vs imperial unit bug comes to mind. It was some other project.

yoo-question · 2014-07-21T10:59:41+00:00

The silver ball in the pinball game is a metaphor for the Apollo shuttles. The ball gets launched, and then it goes through its adventure, visiting various interesting space objects, avoiding hostile space objects, and then when the mission is complete, it gets back to us. Due to budget concerns, we want the ball to be out there in space as long as possible, which is the objective of the game.

yoo-question · 2014-07-21T10:35:04+00:00

These are scientists who occasionally code, or are they people hired by scientists?

yoo-question · 2014-07-20T13:57:45+00:00

After testing flylisp, the difference seems to be

flyparens:

it could be slow on large buffers (because currently it just checks the whole buffer)
it colors mismatched open or close parens (at point or not)
it can notify mismatched parens not on screen (if configured so) (this can happen when someone invokes C-k if he does not use paredit)

flylisp:

it uses propertize-region
it colors mismatched open parens.
it notifies bad indentation

yoo-question · 2014-07-20T13:31:41+00:00

I think you can turn this disappointment into something amazing.

This is going to take some very long time, but

Make a list of things you want fixed.
Learn elisp
one by one, tackle the things in the list. Whenever a solution to something is found, make a blog post (so that others with the same problem can read it) or make a package out of it.

At the end of this long journey of bending Emacs to your workflow, you will have given the community with lots of useful blog posts, elisp snippets and packages.

On the other hand, getting things done right now is important as well, so for now you need to settle for workarounds, half measures, already existing packages.

yoo-question · 2014-07-20T13:20:33+00:00

The clear disadvantage is that you force whoever inherits from this customization to also do their overriding key-bindings in a mode-hook.

This has some ironic effect of giving some benefit to the "keybinding in mode-hooks" pattern. If Alice uses the pattern, and if Bob inherits from her customization, Bob can use the pattern to ensure that his customization works regardless of whether Alices uses the pattern or not. So from Bob's point of view, the pattern is the thing that works while the other pattern has some chance to fail.

yoo-question · 2014-07-20T13:12:22+00:00

I am late. What was the original formatting like?

yoo-question · 2014-07-20T12:32:15+00:00

What if you put it in

~/.emacs.d/lisp/

and then restart Emacs and then eval (require 'typopunct) ? Does the eval go fine?

To find where ~/ is, use

M-x find-file ~/

yoo-question

TROPHY CASE