Re: In defense of Customize [was: Trying to right-align my window on startup]

[Emanuel Berg]

phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> You can argue that this is true of everything beyond
> the lambda calculus. It's not that useful an argument
> though.
>
> Haskell was designed to show what you could do with a
> lazy functional language, and it does that well. It
> is the case that you can do things in this
> environment that are not possible in other
> languages. Whether these are worth the constraints or
> not is a different issue.

Yeah, only those paradigms are general ways to describe
general things (perhaps Haskell is a bad example, as it
is a straight-arrow realization of an idea, or even
ideal) - nonetheless, some persons say C is for "the
computer elite, that writes Unix" (and its
software). So what to use instead? Pascal - that will
get you structured. Smalltalk and/or C++ - to get
modular, well-partitioned software, that is easy
(supposedly) to debug. Or the functional languages, be
it Haskell, Erlang, or Common Lisp, with no
side-effects, recursion, and set functions, so that the
order of execution wont matter so you get concurrent
software, with short "how-not-what" code.

There might be some truth to all that in the sense that
it is helpful to think about, and practice, but one
thing is not better than the other (especially not
speaking generally) and for 98% of all situations it
comes down to the problem, and the person solving the
problems, and the tools (rather than "paradigmatic"
methods) that [s]he uses.

So in this case, instead of discussing what can't be
done, whatever problem we have should be specified and
then I'm confident there are numerous people who can
solve it, using methods from a wide range of fields. I
don't use customize (though I don't think it is bad, it
is actually good given its scope and ungrateful task),
and I have actually no idea how Joe Emacs user fares
with setting settings, so someone else has to specify
what the exact problem is.

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573