[boulder.pm] Snowshoe outing/awful Perl book

[Jonathan Conway]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Walter Pienciak wrote:

> [why the book sucks snipped]
> 
> Ouch.

The most painful thing is that it could have been (and maybe still can
be) a decent book. Like so many books on Perl it fails on the little
things.
 
> > <rant type="personal peeve">
> >    &emacs_rules;  
> > </rant>

I like emacs, but I'm certainly not convinced it rules. I just got sucked
in and then discovered that switching to anything else is painful. Kind of
like crack.

My main point was that significant verbiage throughout the book is devoted
to the author's credentials as a Real Programmer(tm) but he can't figure
out how to turn on a basic feature in emacs. Now if he'd kept himself to
'advanced editors can colorize your code' he'd have been fine, but instead
he puts down emacs for his own inability. I'll admit that it's not a sign
of incompetence per se, but you'd think that after mentioning that emacs
is incredibly popular he'd stop to wonder if maybe someone _had_ added the
feature. Another knock against the editors comment is that he doesn't even
mention vi (which in quite a few surveys is more popular than emacs) and
which has several versions with syntax coloring. I think he'd have been
better off just saying 'Og think color and indentation good'.

> Well . . . I'm a vi guy, and think *that's* pretty advanced. 

vi is reasonably advanced, most of it just doesn't show on the surface. ed
on the other hand...

> My "other" editor is "cat >filename". 

Have you tried the perl debugger? It's a little slow typing all those
print & seek statements, but it's certainly... different.

> (I do play with xemacs when I'm in a GUI mood, but not enough to
> remember any of the Meta-Ctrl-Alt bells-and-whistles keystroke
> chords.)

It's odd given that they're theoretically very similar, but I find Xemacs
much harder to learn key-bindings for. I even started with it but switched
to GNU Emacs after a couple of days. I'm still picking up new stuff, but
that's one of the things I like about it. I think the biggest reason that
I prefer it to vi is that chords are easier for me to get into muscle
memory than sequences. The bells and whistles are largely irrelavant until
I suddenly discover I miss the lack of one in another editor.

Jonathan