On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 04:27:16PM -0400, Steven Edwards wrote:
> Sorry, I didnt mean to start a flame war, just because Emacs sucks. =P

Is this where I fall on the ground laughing?

Typing the phrase 'Emacs sucks' _is_ intentionally starting a flame war.
But hey, you're having your fun, what do you care what the rest of the net
thinks?

Let's just go ahead and do the whole war real quick and get it over with:


You say that. The emacs camp responds with "When you write a nameserver 
in your editor, come talk." The vi camp will here respond with something
about "vi's a pretty good editor. emacs is a shell." The emacs camp now 
responds with a disparaging comment on the lineage of the guy who wrote vi 
in the first place and notes that real editors do not have "beep mode." The 
vi contingent invokes Godwin's Law[0] , claiming the emacs folks are all 
editor-nazis and that real editors do not require the use of multiple 
bucky-keys. 

Then the discussion devolves. Arguments are had about the forty-eleven
versions of vi compared to the one version of emacs, both sides 
considering their way to be the better one. Most people at this point
stick feet in their mouths from not having actually ever used the 
other editor, or in a very few cases, not having done so in the last 
decade. A splinter csh/ksh/bash/zsh/tcsh/ash/sh/you-use-WHAT? war 
splits off. Many people stick their foot in their mouths not having
actually really _used_ the editor they're touting. Insert discussion
on regexps here.

It's right about this time the guy using notepad on Windown jumps in. 
Both sides demolish him and drive on. 

In a stunning act of clarity (or at least clarity for this point in 
the, uh, er, "debate") , an emacs aficionado pipes up noting that emacs 
includes lisp for writing macros. This is utterly drowned out by the 
rest of the argument, who have largely devolved into claiming other
people have sexual relations with aquatic waterfowl and a side 
discussion regarding the status of pregnant chads. Oops, wrong argument.
One lone vi person is actually reading this morass instead of just 
spewing mayhem and vitriol, and notes that some implementations of vi
include perl. Various terms such as "syntax highlighting" are bandied
about, half of which nobody really knows what they mean but by god, 
their editor has it. 


The group moderator comes in at this point and moderates the list. Trolls
of all sorts go home whining that they were having a perfectly reasonable
conversation and that bastard moderator ousted them for no good reason.

Life goes on, the vi people use vi, the emacs people use emacs, the 
notepad people... well, let's not go there. Moral of the story: If you 
don't like someone else's [insert object here], shut the hell up!

Now that we're done with the emacs/vi flamewar, shall I go ahead and 
get the bsd/linux one out of the way? 

[0] Godwin's Law states that on Usenet, once the name Hitler or the term
Nazi is invoked, a conversation can have no further meaning. Trouble with
that is that my own corrolary to that law states that any conversation that
might eventually cause Godwin's Law to be invoked had no meaning to begin 
with, so it's not like Godwin's gonna stop anything.

-JDF	[_Real_ programmers use 'cat > a.out']
--
J.D. Forinash                           ,-.       
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS  ( <  	  
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391                 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.