Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 at 02:41, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@octave.org> wrote:
>
> I was asked to relay this from an anonymous IRC user. The words below are not
> mine. I, Jordi, did not write this. Someone wanted to post this anonymously to
> emacs-devel, and I'm doing it on their behalf.
> (...)


Hi Jordi, Anynomous, and all,

my problem with Anonymous's proposal - here:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-10/msg00018.html

is that I don't know how it would be developed and what its prototypes
would look like...

Suppose that we develop a small script that would change startup.el to
add a button that would open a beginner's page in Org that would
initially have, say, only two lines of text and Org links with
"elisp:" actions. Would Anonymous be willing to a) run that script on
his/her/their machine? And b) then run that script on some friend's
machines to see if they find that button too hard to find and too hard
to click on?

Let me write "A+Fs" for "Anonymous plus friends", "Chiyaab button" for
the button in the startup page that says "Click here if you are a
beginner", and "Beginners page" for the page that that button points
to.

I am especially interested in the "degree of pollution(*)" of elisp
code. I know that for some people having something like this in a
tutorial,

  To understand what is the init file click on _this button_, or,
  equivalently, execute the elisp code below by moving the point to
  its line and typing C-e C-x C-e:

    (info "(emacs)Init file")

...makes that tutorial completely unsuitable for beginners - and I
would like to know how numerous these people are, and learn more about
how they think.

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://anggtwu.net/eepitch.html
    http://anggtwu.net/#eev


(*): I was rereading Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble" some time ago,
and it has this quote, taken from Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger":

  ...pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself
  and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be
  joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows
  from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely
  to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social,
  are clearly defined.

     A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic] has developed
  some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which
  should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger
  for someone.