Re: Religious Wars (was: Re: KDevelop vs. Eclipse vs. Emacs)

"a trap of learning". Touche.

On 9/5/07, Nadav Har'El <nyh-TS7m/[email protected]> wrote:
>
>   On Sun, Sep 02, 2007, Omer Zak wrote about "Religious Wars (was: Re:
> [hackers-il] KDevelop vs. Eclipse vs.?Emacs)":
> >..
> > However, the topic of religious (or holy) wars in this context is an
> > interesting topic to explore at its own right, so I'm accepting the
> > challenge.
> >
> > It seems to me that religious wars are about choice between two (or
> > more) approaches, which are more or less equivalent - but require some
> > time investment to switch from one to the other.
>
> I don't fully agree. Such "wars" indeed exist, but are faught mainly by
> trolls, who, for example, pop up on a Linux list and start debating
> whether
> you should use Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, when everyone knows that these
> are
> basically permutations of more-or-less the same features, and if choice X
> has some feature not in choice Y, then the next version of choice Y will
> surely
> have it, and some new feature that X doesn't have.
>
> The wars become more interesting, and more "religious", when the choices
> are not equivalent, and both sides acklowedge specific differences between
> the two choices - they just can't agree if the difference is good, or bad.
>
> In real religions, for example, everyone agrees that a major difference
> between
> Judaism and Christianity is Jesus Christ - it's just that Christians think
> this is a *good* thing in christianity, and Jews think it's a *bad* thing.
> Similarly, in software,
>
> > The famous example of vi vs. emacs religious war illustrates this point.
> > Both editors are powerful text editors, and both have some sort of
> > scripting capabilities. However, to switch from one to the other
>
> Actually, the VI/Emacs religious war broke out and continued when there
> was
> a real difference between those editor's philosophy. Emacs indeed had
> powerful
> scripting capabilities, but vi had none (it had a simple configuration
> file,
> ~/.exrc, but you couldn't call that scripting by a longshot). Emacs' camp
> thought this made Emacs obviously better, while vi's camp disagreed and
> ridiculed Emacs' scripting (saying things like "Emacs is a great operating
> system, but it's missing a good editor). A second "religious" argument
> between the vi and emacs camps was the style of keyboard binding. The vi
> camp believed in "modal" binding (you have insert mode, and command mode)
> and in combinations of single-key commands, while the emacs camp believed
> in global binding (a key does the same thing everywhere) and key
> combinations
> (liek control-alt-a). Each camp thought the other's method sucks.
>
> Of course, these VI/Emacs wars are a thing of the 80s. Today, both XEmacs
> and Vim have GUIs and scripting languages, and the differences between the
> two editors are indeed starting to look cosmetic, rather than fundumental.
> Both editors are starting to look like operating systems, rather than
> editors ;-)
>
> > requires some time investment - to learn the other editor, to cultivate
> > different mental habits, to re-create one's personal list of scripts,
> > tips, riffs and shortcuts.
>
> This doesn't explain the "holy war" aspect. If I have a lot of scripts and
> knowledge about program X, why would that automatically send me to mailing
> lists and write that Y sucks?
>
> I think that I would write that Y sucks, only when I believe Y really
> sucks,
> i.e., not only am I used to X, but there are significant differences
> between
> X and Y which - at least to me - don't look like something consmetic or
> "what I'm used to", but rather very important differences.
>
> For example, as you probably know, I use zsh. I settled on zsh as my
> favorite
> shell around 15 years ago - after having previously used ksh and bourne
> shell.
> While Zsh is my favorite shell, I have nothing really bad to say about
> Bash.
> It doesn't suck - it's probably great, just isn't as great as zsh ;-) So
> you
> won't catch me slandering bash in mailing lists and joining crusades
> against
> it. On the other hand, I do think that csh sucks, and can explain my
> reasoning.
> I *will* join any crusade against csh that you invite me to... Because I
> believe that csh is really inferior to zsh (and bash) - it's not just a
> historic choice - and I don't want newbies to fall into the trap of
> learning
> it.
>
> --
> Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Sep 5 2007, 22 Elul 5767
> nyh-TS7m/[email protected] <nyh%40math.technion.ac.il>|-----------------------------------------
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The path of least resistance is what
> http://nadav.harel.org.il |makes rivers and politicians crooked.
>  
>



-- 
Sincerely Yours,
Omer Shapira