Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Emanuel Berg]

MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com> writes:

> What about trying a different approach?
> Telling them, "Learn Emacs. You'll find it useful in
> the long run," is guaranteed to make them hate it.
> It's like being told, "Eat your vegetables.
> They're good for you."
>
> Instead, why not challenge them to do some task
> whose end result they'll consider useful, but that
> you know will be a royal pain in the ass to do with
> a simple-minded text editor. Make sure it's not
> something contrived. Tell them to use whatever
> editor they're most comfortable with. After 15 min.
> or more of tedious editing in their underpowered,
> brain-dead editor, show them that you can do the
> same thing in 15 seconds using some general-purpose
> Emacs feature.

I agree telling people stuff in general and trying to
convince them is pointless, perhaps even counter
productive. It is like all the criminals and
disfunctional crazy people in jails and institutions.
Why did they end up there? I guess they didn't read
the law book! Perhaps the authorities should compile
a simplified version and hand it out so the convicts
can read it after dropping the soap in the shower
room...

A better approach is to just have the software we like
*exposed* to as many people as possible, and in as
many ways as possible. A minority - small, but still -
will be curious, and a minority of the minority will
instantly see this is something they will like, a lot.
This is what happened to me. I don't remember
switching from nano to Emacs but I also do not
remember ever wanting to go back.

Use the software, and do cool things with it. If that
doesn't work on people, is there anything we can say,
or do, or write that will make for better PR, that
will work? And: do we even *want* it to work on the
people which were unaffected by the cool things that
were all natural at that?

But then, how do we expose it to people?
Answer: activity.

Here are some examples:

When I wrote my Bachelor degree paper, I included
a screenshot of Emacs and some comments (it was
a subsection of the paper comparing interfaces).
When I wrote my Master, I used (and included in the
report) a short Elisp program to do some computation.
I also made an experiment when a compilation process
was timed in different settings - what I compiled was
actually my Emacs, Gnus, w3m (etc.) init files! As you
correctly suspect, this was only some 50% convenience
(and even less practical necessity), the rest 50% was
propaganda and "coolness", and the most important 50%
was enjoyment being active with my favorite tools
(yes, you get an extra 50% if you do all those).
Later I gave a talk to describe some project, and
instead of the pathetic "Power"Point I used Emacs -
figures were ASCII and Unicode, and I had setup
ultra-fast shortcuts to jump between and across the
material (from anywhere to everywhere). This worked as
the confidence of using what I use every day didn't
disappear with the rest of the home-field advantage,
and besides I could show code and respond to questions
by showing stuff the same way I access it every day,
and then when done carry on with the presentation by
going to the next figure - like this:

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/dumps/scheduler.png

Another example is, I use BibLaTeX to keep track of
what I read, so every time I discuss books with my
friend the next day I send them a mail - again
ultra-fast and convenient - just a yank from the .bib
source to the message-buffer - "this was the book you
asked me about" -

    @book{aku-aku,
      author    = {Thor Heyerdahl},
      publisher = {Bonniers},
      title     = {Aku-aku. Påsköns hemlighet},
      year      = 1957
    }

I use Elisp to keep track of birds so I can add new
ones without updating the sum digit each time:

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/BIRDS

And so on. I always find new, unexpected things to do
with it. And that is the best I can do! I personally
would not mind meeting cool people who do amazing
stuff. While I unsure I can be that cool person to
anyone, I am 100% convinced if I were to take the
"convince approach", I could speak to every girl in
the entire public library Tuesday afternoon and
I wouldn't turn a single one of them into Emacs, Gnus,
Usenet, or zsh users (if anything, I'd be banned from
the building, and I even know all the staff!).
And even if I could convince people - which
I absolutely can't - I wouldn't enjoy doing it, tho it
would be beneficial to them to stop do the iPhone
idiocy (and interesting to me, as it is so alone at
the top ;)) - but it plain *doesn't work*, so why be
frustrated about it?

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