Re: emacs-losedows-builder

[Richard Copley]

On 2 September 2016 at 15:15, Kaushal Modi <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2016, 7:12 AM Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> Or perhaps
>> you think of Microsoft as a competitor that deserves respect, rather
>> than as an enemy that has subjugated millions of people.
>
>
> Actually before you brought this up, I never thought of the "win" part in
> Windows could mean any respect at all. "Win" gives a positive message
> probably just in English language and happens to be the first part of the
> word windows. This kind of micro-digging to find ways of name calling the
> competitor does not suit well to our community. If we should find and
> advertise tangible reasons to why we are better than the competitor.
>
> For all many would care, windows might as well be foodows, and the code in
> the patch used foo- instead of win-.  That "win-" part means nothing else
> than happening to be the first part of Windows. Victory flags do not go
> waving in my mind when I read some code with "win-". I believe such trivial
> refactoring feedback would be demoralizing to contributors.

I agree. The ancestor of the word "window" came from words meaning
"wind" and "eye", according to the OED, but it's natural and near-universal
to treat it as an atomic unit.

There's no particular need to use "win" as an abbreviation and it's not
very pleasing, so I don't mind trying to avoid it. The exception is when
referring to Win32 (the subsystem, the API or whatever). That's its name
and it's silly to call it anything else.

> But I agree with the similar change suggested by Glenn on the grounds of
> coding consistency.