Re: Emacs newbies [Re: Which Emacs CL mode?}

From: Pascal Bourguignon (spam_at_thalassa.informatimago.com)
Date: 02/15/04 

Date: 15 Feb 2004 11:45:34 +0100

cstacy@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:
> So my first question would be: why do people have trouble
> finding any or all that help?

Because people DON'T read the computer output. This could have been
in doubt in the time of CLI but no more with GUI: the number of alter
dialogs that get closed without being read! Hence the refining of the
Grunt! user interface. Don't bother with error messages, just grunt,
and if the device allow it, the second time send 1000 Volts to the
user. ed(1) was right!

> So I think the lesson here is that new users can be fully sabotaged
> by incompetent system administrators who decide that new users won't
> be wanting any of those bothersome "Help" messages!

Not nowadays, when the system administrators are actually the
distribution packages.

> I actually learned it in an afternoon, on a 300 baud printing
> terminal. No documentation or anything, but I had someone showing
> me how to use it. I wrote myself a cheat-*** of the dozen or so
> basic keystroke commands. I remember a couple of days later sitting
> down by myself at a (rare) CRT terminal and seeing it for the first
> time with the real-time display feature. I was, of course,
> astounded! I think my expectations at the time were substantially
> different from today's computer users, to say the least. One thing
> I'd like to understand is what they are expecting in a program like
> Emacs (and thus perhaps in a more general sense).

That's another problem. I witnessed it with the evolution of MacOS.
The "intuitiveness" of the GUI built a lot on the progressiveness of
the feature introduction over the releases. People who learnt
Macintosh on the first version, then went up the ladder step by step
thru each versions had much less problems than people who skipped
directly to MacOS 6.0.5, or 7.1 or 8.5 or 9.0.

I learnt emacs by way of MPW (the ability to add commands to the
editor) and NeXTSTEP Edit.app (the basic command-keys). Actually, the
basics are explained in the tutorial. \

Emacs should force feed it to the novice users and should not allow
them to proceed before they've understood it. 

-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he doesn't
want merely because you think it would be good for him.--Robert Heinlein
http://www.theadvocates.org/