Re: Great SWT Program

On Jan 5, 1:09 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not that it matters, but in the US, as I understand it, tax forms
postmarked by the deadline are considered to have been filed on
time, whenever they actually get delivered. Perhaps things are
different wherever you live. Just sayin'.

That is definitely not something you can assume you can count on
outside the US. And, perhaps, not even inside it, whatever the rules
say.

This is what would happen if you *succeeded* and they became
proficient with emacs, resulting in everything that ISN'T emacs
becoming hard for them to use, because of course only one of emacs and
everything else can be easy to use at a time.

I have been told, by more than one person, in other newsgroups, that
with sufficient practice one can become the equivalent of bilingual,
equally at ease with emacs and applications that follow the, um,
"prevailing standard for Windows applications"?

That's for savants and prodigies -- the same sorts that can become
fluently bilingual in adulthood "for real". It's obviously not going
to work for "the rest of us". It's also a load of unnecessary work,
since you can be just as productive with the right set of modern sane
tools as an emacs expert can be with emacs, if not more so, and with
the merest fraction of the training.

Even for the "fluently bilingual" there'd be a tendency towards
accidentally mixing "languages" and taking extra time to "switch
gears" when switching tasks. In the case of sometimes using unix
software, which tends to leave all kinds of weapons lying about loaded
and unsafetied, the accidental mixing of "languages" will result in
self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the foot from time to time. Some of
those weapons, notably anything that deletes from the filesystem and
accepts wildcards, are apparently of the "illegally converted for
fully-automatic fire" variety. Chew your foot right off by the time
you realize you've had an accident.

(Funny how nostalgia buffs in the computer field always seem to favor
stuff from that particular era. It's never earlier, e.g. punched cards
or toggling everything in manually after each reboot, for some reason,
and never later, like old-skool Windows 3.x era stuff, either. I
wonder why?)

Perhaps it's that punched cards really *were* awkward and annoying,
whereas those text-mode tools were not, once one learned to use them?

But they were. They still are. They just seem to hold some sort of
strange fascination for a certain tiny subset of the population,
perhaps those homozygous for some recessive allele that's a loss-of-
function mutation of some gene expressed in the brain and involved in
attention fixation and reward circuitry. Probably the dominant, wild-
type allele leads to appreciating the butts of members of the opposite
sex instead; it would explain a great deal about both normal behavior,
the text-tool fascinations of a certain type of unix geek, AND the
latter's celibate lifestyle. A theory with this much explanatory power
is well worth further research, of course...
.