Re: basic question: going back to dired

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 18:53, Bastien Guerry <bzg@altern.org> wrote:

> Yes, as long as the terminology matches the underlying concepts.

The underlying concept is called a "buffer" because... well, just
because it has always been called that on Emacs. "scratchpad" would
have been equally valid, or "workspace" (we're talking more than 20
years ago, before the current wave of IDEs), or "temporary store" or
who knows what.

> For example, replacing "buffer" by "workspace" in the manual would not
> only be a huge work, it would also be misleading: because you would soon
> have to deal with expectations that people already have with the notion
> of "workspace".

Why the fixation with "workspace"?

> So instead of saying "A workspace in Emacs is like the
> one you have in Eclipse, but there is a difference..." - why not stick
> to history?

We're bound to stick with history. But it is nice (and perhaps even
useful, in some way) to think what benefit would we gain by using a
more common terminology. At least that will compel us to choose more
adequate names for new features.

> I do react about terminology because I think such a discussion is never
> about terminology only.  It's also about the concepts behind.  If Emacs
> were more file-centric, then I wouldn't understand why there is no
> shortcut (sic!) to Open/Close.

I cannot speak on behalf of others, but certainly I'm talking
exclusively about terminology.

> Ok, history always comes with some arbitrary choice.  But it's hard to
> move from an arbitrary choice with a non-arbitrary reason.

It's hard to move from an arbitrary, deeply ingrained choice, even if
it'd be useful to do so.

   Juanma