Re: Fwd: sign off on XEmacs 21.5

"SL Baur" <steve(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: I always found it remarkable what is supposed to be covered by sailing under the purported sign of an overall joke. But then there are examples in English literature like, say, Shakespeare letting Titus Andronicus stab his ravished and mutilated daughter for the sake of making a word play, long before programmer humor and electronic communication became commonplace. It is part of the success story of smilies that people think _nothing_ should be counted as objectionable as long as a suitable number of interpunction marks introduces a jocular namespace presumably not in conflict with the default one which should stop people from linking the words with offenses. If offense is taken regardless, it is a sign of humorlessness in the linker at whose expense the joke has been made, in a similar way that it is a sign of gluttony if somebody objects to having his breakfast pilfered. Most people on this list would not particularly enjoy if their editor was named "Zawinski XEmacs" and if you can't make a joke funny without calling Emacs "FSF GNU Emacs", it probably was either not all too funny to start with, or the cheap shot detracts from the real joke. Now taking a look at the "mind waste" potential of Emacs and vim with regard to the relative state, consistency, accuracy and accessibility of the respective documentation and functionality, it becomes apparent that your concern is not about wasting people's minds on editors, but rather about wasting them on _other_ editors when XEmacs is the most starved vampire of the whole set (the undead metaphor saves us from speculating about "beyond salvation"). In that light, your posting is indeed overall a fine show of self-deprecating cynicism only superficially masked by name-calling. Thanks for letting me on. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta