Re: My First TLUG Meeting

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "George" == George M Dapat <george@example.com> writes:

    George>      Anyway, I made a list on what I've learned after
    George> attending my first TLUG meeting. Please make any
    George> corrections/comments if you find some errors.  So, here
    George> goes nothing:

    George>      1. The Linux kernel is multi-threaded starting from
    George> 1.3.x. But there's no clear indication of a performance
    George> improvement. (Meaning, there's no sense messing with it
    George> yet.)

Well, multi-threading is only going to help those programs that use
lots of shared resources like files and IO.  Since the kernel is
itself the most important resource and does the synchronization, it's
not clear to me how much can really be saved by multi-threading the
kernel.  Granted, any efficiency gain in the kernel is a win.

Multi-threading user applications is easier, and more likely to be a
win, but requires careful analysis of the program.

Multi-tasking interpreters, like Java, now there's where the big win
comes in.

    George>      6. Even the experts don't agree on the best editor -
    George> Jim likes jed and Steve likes emacs.

JED is very nice, but it's not Emacs.  That's the main "problem" with
JED---ie, it's a matter of personal taste.  There are key bindings I
use a lot, like goto-end-of-sentence, that aren't available in JED's
Emacs emulation.  JED's programming modes are built-in, and things
like indentation and so on are often different from what I like and
expect.  (In particular, JED likes to indent 3 spaces, while I prefer
4.  It's also extremely insistent about where it wants to put braces.)
I started using vi at the command line in superuser windows for a
while (I don't think it's possible to su only in some of your Emacs
buffers), but then I discovered that mule starts up almost as fast as
long as you don't need X and Japanese.  So the extra second it takes
"mule -nw" to load in a xterm is negligible.  I've been using GNU
Emacs for everything for fifteen years now.  It's not worth it to me
to change.

That's the other thing about Emacs.  You can use it for everything---
it's practically a complete user interface to the computer.  If you
can do it on a text terminal, you can do it in an Emacs buffer.  You
can do FTP, WWW, telnet, read News and mail, execute Unix commands,
build programs, use RCS, and much of it transparently with 2 or 3
keystroke sequences, from inside Emacs with multiple windows.

This is not so important these days, but when I started using Emacs it 
was the most convenient task-switching multi-windowed "user interface" 
available.  A year or so later the Mac came out, but it was expensive
and not networked.  And I'm a text-oriented kind of guy.  Words are my 
thing, not graphics.  I love X, don't get me wrong, but I would give
it up if you made me choose between it and Emacs.  I need that
flexible text-munging ability.

So it's a generational difference, really.  Emacs is great if you're
text-oriented and like keyboard shortcuts.  Us old folks are like that 
;-)

One thing that Emacs (Mule) does well that JED does not and cannot be
easily made to do (I've looked at the code) is Japanese.  I guess
there is a Japanese JED in the JE package, but Mule has such a long
lead I don't think JED will ever catch up.  I don't think JED is even
very graceful about European languages.

Finally, I don't like JED's scripting language.  It *looks* like C,
but the *semantics* are like Forth (it's a stack-oriented language).
This is unlike Perl which adds to C semantics (implicit returns, true
strings, true arrays) as well as incorporating some aspects of shells, 
sed, and awk.  This is peculiar to me; I just get very nervous
programming S-Lang (JED's scripting language) because it looks
familiar but it's not.  Emacs LISP on the other hand looks like
something only a Martian could love, so I know I'm in alien territory.

I guess there is a real point to all this.  That is, it's access to
*tools* that's important.  Emacs is a tool that I'm familiar with and
is very flexible.  But *you* may very well be better off developing
your own set of tools, which may include smaller, more specialized
tools instead of a huge general-purpose one like Emacs.

If you really want to get the most out of your computer, always
remember that it's highly customizable.  Make it fit you, not the
other way around.  Play with new stuff, see what you can get it to do.

On the other hand, you may prefer to use someone else's setup.  That's 
OK too, it's just not my philosophy.  So I wouldn't worry too much
about what different people like, everybody likes different things.
What's important is to find something that fits the way *you* work.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com