Re: Emacs learning curve

[Óscar Fuentes]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

You have several good points wrt the interpretation of "split" and the
internal usage on up/down scrolling.

I think we agree on the desirability of not confusing the user with odd
terms and on not entrenching an Emacs dialect with words that have a well
established meaning outside Emacs. At the same time it is not necessary
to care too much about terms not exposed to the end user.

> Would it help attract new users if we renamed it `page-down-command'?  Is that
> your argument?

No, not at all. Using familiar terms for newcomers will not attract
them. Using a friendly and clear terminology (at least for the
user-visible commands) will not *scare* *away* prospective users.

[snip]

> Perversion in this regard means doing something that is illogical.  Doing
> something that might not correspond to "established practice" is not 
> necessarily
> perverse.  It might or might not be perverse.
>
> Would you say that someone who speaks only Catalan is perverse, because 
> Chinese
> is the current "established practice" worldwide, or because Spanish is the
> "established practice" in Spain?

Suppose you go to Barcelona and ask for some indication to a nearby
pedestrian. You ask in Spanish, because you don't speak Catalan, and you
know that to all practical effects, every Catalan speaks Spanish. But
you get an answer in Catalan. (Actualy, this is a very typical scenario
on real life.) You think "This guy is not interested on
communicating. He must be one of those arrogant Catalans who enjoys
demonstrating his despise of Spain."  Most of the time, the truth is
that as you are assuming he speaks Spanish, he is assuming you
understand Catalan, which is a very reasonable assumption for anyone to
make in Catalonia. But too often the outcome is that you go away
irritated with that person, who probably tried to give you a helpful
response.

Likewise, if someone looks at Emacs and starts seeing familiar terms
used on an odd way, strange terms used for naming usual concepts with
well stablished names, etc. he may end thinking that the Emacs project
lacks the resources for staying with the times, or that its developers
are prone to use an internal dialect for whatever reason. In the best of
cases, he will perceive an extra difficulty while learning Emacs. At the
worst, he'll see the Emacs "dialect" as an hostile sign. The truth is
that the Emacs community welcomes new people and is happy to communicate
with them, but having a dialect that adds nothing to Emacs' experience
doesn't help to transmit a warm impression to the prospective user.

BTW, I'm not saying that switching terms will make Emacs popular
overnight, nor that not doing it will mean the death of Emacs.

[snip]