(Part 2) Top products from r/emacs

You make an interesting point. Though I have heard of the research you allude to, and of a book that makes a similar argument (Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes), I must confess to being a bit skeptical.

If it's true that adding money to the equation makes developers lose motivation, how do you explain all the successful kickstarters out there, all the successfull donation-ware software, or all the successfull commercial software in the world?

Also, specifically on the subject of Magit, do you now expect Magit's lead developer to do less work on Magit now that he's fully funded? I know I personally expect great things now that he can focus completely on Magit without having to worry about money.

About your implication that Emacs developers are writing Emacs code for fun: I'm not sure if that's universally true. I think in most cases they're scratching an itch: they have some problem and they want to solve it, and incidentally also want to share the code with the world. They're not going to suddenly stop having problems they want to solve if they get money, and I don't think they're going to stop actually solving them or sharing the results if they get money either.

On the other hand, I do think there's some truth in what you say. I think the easiest way to turn a fun hobby in to drudgery is to be forced to do it day in and day out, whether you feel like it or not, with loss of control over direction or quality, with having to answer to all sorts of people that don't understand what you do and don't care about, and only care about using you as a tool to make themselves more money -- in short, by turning the hobby in to a stressful job. But as you can see, there are a lot more factors that go in to making a hobby in to a stressful job than merely adding money.

I agree with the recommendations for SICP - it's great.

In addition to the MIT videos, there are videos from Brian Harvey's SICP class at UC Berkeley. They're available both on YouTube and in iTunes.

However, I'll admit that I found SICP a bit overwhelming at first. For context, I'd been programming (primarily Python) for a couple years, but it was my first exposure to Lisp. I ended up taking a brief break from it to work my way through The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. It only took a week or two and at the end I was much more comfortable diving into SICP.

Not everyone likes the Schemer books - they're quite distinctive - but I loved them. I found them particularly helpful in really groking recursion and continuations.

I cannot think of any examples of books which approach design in this manner. Aside from end examples of such programs like Vim and its related reimplementations, Sam/Wiley/Acme, the Acid debugger and a lot of Plan9/Inferno, I think practicing implementing parsers, lexers, and other programming language tools will provide how to achieve this concept. The closest literature which presents these ideas abstractly are those targeting DSLs; some example texts which are high quality are: Domain-Specific Languages, DSLs in Action, Language IMplementation Pattern, and DSL Engineering. Although they obviously cannot ensure that the resulting pattern enables thinking in terms of the relevant semantic level easier.

The primary advantage to designing programs in this manner is that it enables the interfaces to result in a composability that is consistent in its means of interaction; from an implementation and maintainability perspective it is beneficial as well due to the components being decoupled from one another more easily and also how to make use of it in other contexts as well being more obvious.

An example of this being the case is comparing evil-mode to other implementations of the same features within emacs, there is a lot of reduplication of effort to implement features that are instead only requiring adding a new text object or motion in evil-mode which is very nice; relatedly we can compare the same implementation in Vim's code base which is implemented in C which has poor to none metaprogramming tools available and implementing the same idea in emacs which has excellent metaprogramming faculties and thus can trivially be extended to new language contexts soundly. The end result is the implementations being much more trivial to accomplish and reasoning about them being much easier. Discretely the magnitude of source code required is much smaller also.

It also reduces the necessary grey matter to understand the application as well which is the most advantageous part of these designs, instead of rote memorization being required, the person simply has to understand its grammar. Ideally this grammar is shared by other programs so that the effort is less duplicated, but even if it is just that individual program it is worthwhile.

If you like reading about computer history, I really enjoyed Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. (There's a pdf floating around if you google search it, but I don't think it would be good form to directly link it since the book is still in print.) It's a really fascinating look at the early hacker cultures in MIT and Silicon Valley from the late 1950s through the early 1980s.

There's actually an interesting literature on extrinsic vs. intrinsic rewards, and the upshot is often that getting paid for something reduces intrinsic reward, which can be a powerful motivator. Getting small amounts of money could, counterintuitively, actually disincentivize work on Emacs.

There's an interesting book on this phenomenon called Drive: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805

> do I have to keep on and believe Emacs is a better env for my needs?

Why did you switch to emacs? What was vim lacking that you feel emacs can offer?

Have you tried using netrw to edit remote files in vim? What about vim's autocomplete didn't work for you?

If you're already comfortable in vim, you might get more mileage out of just learning to use vim more effectively.

If you're determined to switch, just wait for a time when you know things will be a little slow for a week or so, and switch cold turkey. Maybe read a book about it in the mean time. You'll get used to it in no time!

I'm reading through this. It's out of date, but has still been really helpful to me understanding the logic of emacs etc. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-GNU-Emacs-Nutshell-handbook/dp/1565921526/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1518041820&sr=8-3&keywords=emacs+oreilly

It's very cheap, too, which is a big bonus over more modern ones.

I switched to evil/spacemacs a few years ago when my RSI was worsening to see if it helped. It helped for a short time but then my RSI started coming back. Vim keybindings can also cause RSI.

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However I don't regret learning evil. I really enjoy modal editing. Also, trying out spacemacs exposed me to lots of cool packages I didn't know about before. Though I'm using my own config these days, whenever I'm trying out a new language I usually check the spacemacs config to see what packages are installed there.

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Over the years I've tried various things that have been more or less helpful for RSI:

- Conquering carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress injuries

- http://www.workrave.org/

- Voice coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI, https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/aenea)

- Mind-body prescription (it's a bit wacky, I don't agree with all of it, but I think there's something to it & a lot of people seem to find it helpful)

- Standing desk

- Back massage (https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Tail-Ball-Roller-Corded/dp/B0078PX01G/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ball+rope+back+massage&qid=1558366141&s=gateway&sr=8-4)

- Exercise

Sounds like you want a kinesis https://www.amazon.com/Kinesis-KB500USB-BLK-Advantage-Keyboard/dp/B000LVJ9W8

1993 at the University of Oslo computer science lab. Not sure exactly what computer, because they had lots of different ones. Might well be a terminal hooked up to some SunOS server.

I'm also an author, and my book that's coming out next year was 100% written in Emacs. My two previous books, too.

Emacs 24 Reference Manual page 141 "Accessing Compressed Files" http://www.amazon.com/dp/9881327717

My own question was lazy:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Org-Mode-Reference-Manual/dp/9881327709/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1407248946&sr=8-5&keywords=org+mode

Maybe Adobe Indesign? It may be possible to torture LaTeX into doing stuff like this -- https://www.amazon.com/COCHISE-STRONGHOLD-Rock-Climbing-West/dp/161850102X/ -- but it's not fun.