[29305] in Perl-Users-Digest
Perl-Users Digest, Issue: 549 Volume: 11
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Thu Jun 21 14:14:32 2007
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:14:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Perl-Users Digest <Perl-Users-Request@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU>
To: Perl-Users@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Perl-Users Digest Thu, 21 Jun 2007 Volume: 11 Number: 549
Today's topics:
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and (Joel J. Adamson)
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and <notbob@nothome.com>
Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and (Joel J. Adamson)
Re: Trying to make sense of perl for web development. krakle@visto.com
Using PERL to solve a specific bioinformatics problem <mzhao1@gmail.com>
Re: Using PERL to solve a specific bioinformatics probl <glennj@ncf.ca>
Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 6 Apr 01) (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
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Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:06:45 -0400
From: jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson)
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <87645h73ei.fsf@W0053328.mgh.harvard.edu>
Twisted <twisted0n3@gmail.com> writes:
> Yeah, and I abhor the elitist systems that are designed with the
> philosophy that anyone who hasn't mastered years of arcane
> memorization and training in just that one idiosyncratic system is /
> ipso facto/ "stupid and unsophisticated". Most of us 6 and a half
> billion people have better uses for our time, such as buckling in and
> being promptly productive, once we're out of high school or college,
> and fully three and a quarter of us are at least as smart as average,
> and so /ipso facto/ *not* "stupid and unsophisticated".
>
You see, though, the problem is that computers are *not* easy to use.
People only say that they've been made easy to use in order to *sell*
things. The number one commodity in the technology business (with a
huge profit-margin attached to it) is "user-friendly." And it's
baloney! No one in my office that uses one of these supposedly
user-friendly machines thinks that it's actually easy to use. They
slam their keyboards and throw their hands up *every* day.
The only solution that really works is for people to _learn_ how to
use computers, and to accept that it will be a challenge.
And as for the arcane commands needed to get to the help page, their
on the splash screen. Have you used Emacs recently?
Joel
--
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA 02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109
A webpage of interest:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sylvester-response.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:03:05 -0600
From: Robert Uhl <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <m3myyt47nq.fsf@latakia.dyndns.org>
Twisted <twisted0n3@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Emacs is amazingly beginner-friendly for the power and flexibility it
>> provides. [snip]
>
> That's a joke, right? I tried it a time or two. Every time it was
> rapidly apparent that doing anything non-trivial would require
> consulting a cheat sheet. The printed-out kind, since navigating to
> the help and back without already having the help displayed and open
> to the command reference was also non-trivial.
C-h i, C-x b RET is non-trivial?!?
> Four hours of wasted time later, with zero productivity to show for
> it, I deleted it. The same thing happened again, so it wasn't a bad
> day or a fluke or a one-off or the particular version, either.
If you'd spent half an hour using the tutorial (helpfully displayed
right there when you start emacs), you could have saved three and a half
hours of wasted time. And you'd now be using an actual text editor,
which is often helpful.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
The cover art on the O'Reilly tome isn't meant to anthropomorphize
sendmail itself after all; it's actually a subliminal warning that
one'd need to be bats to want to use sendmail. --Anthony de Boer
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:09:10 -0600
From: Robert Uhl <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <m3ir9h47dl.fsf@latakia.dyndns.org>
Twisted <twisted0n3@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> > I have that exact URL now --
>> >http://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html
>>
>> Utterly unrelated to Emacs.
>
> I think it is quite relevant. Clunky computer interfaces may not be so
> dramatically dangerous, but they certainly can hamper productivity.
You're quite right. Windows/Mac user interfaces are so clunky that they
massively hamper productivity. Emacs, OTOH, enables it. For example,
C-s is search forward; C-r is search backward ('reverse'); C-M-s is
search forward for a regular expression; C-M-r is search backward for a
regular expression. A Windows or Mac editor would have C-s for save,
and that's it. It might have C-f for find, but it'd pop up a dialogue
instead of offering an interactive search, causing a mental context
switch. Searching would interrupt one's flow of thought rather than
being part of it.
> Between Windows bugs and gratuitous misfeatures (e.g. DRM) and Unix
> clunkiness, billions of dollars of potential productivity is lost
> worldwide every *month*.
You left out user refusal to learn...
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
If I could sum up my life in one sentence, I think it would be: He was born, he
lived, and then he kept on living, much longer than anyone had ever lived
before, getting richer and richer and glowing with a bright white light.
--Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey [1999]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:11:35 -0600
From: Robert Uhl <eadmund42@NOSPAMgmail.com>
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <m3ejk5479k.fsf@latakia.dyndns.org>
Twisted <twisted0n3@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> But Emacs does not have a "clunky" interface.
>
> That's for the everyday novice-to-intermediate user to decide.
Why should the ignorant decide? Do you leave the decision of what great
art is to 3 year olds and their doting parents? Do you leave the
decision of what great food is to the ignorant, unwashed,
McDonald's-devouring masses? Why then do you leave the decision of
what's a useful interface to those with insufficient experience?
Emacs has a slight learning curve (so too did your Windows/Mac OS
interface conventions--you've just forgotten them), but it is easy to
use. A Windows or Mac OS text editor may have an easier learning curve,
but it'll never be as easy to use.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
I read [.doc files] with 'rm.' All you lose is the Microsoft-specific
font selections, the macro viruses and the luser babblings.
--Gary `Wolf' Barnes
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:26:59 -0500
From: notbob <notbob@nothome.com>
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <stSdnY-DxqFOO-fbnZ2dnUVZ_qidnZ2d@comcast.com>
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.emacs.]
> If you'd spent half an hour using the tutorial (helpfully displayed
> right there when you start emacs), you could have saved three and a half
> hours of wasted time. And you'd now be using an actual text editor,
> which is often helpful.
Your statement is obviously based on your assumption everyone has as
good a memory as you. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. I
came to emacs as a geezer with a less than sterling short term memory.
I got about 8 keystrokes into the tutorial before I was lost. I
finally had to start a cheat sheet. It's also a PIA to read a
tutorial and practice in another window until you know how to
open/close/juggle said windows. I never did get much from emacs'
tutorial. It also took me awhile to train my pinkies to reach for
that until-now-unused Ctrl key. No, using emacs is not trivial. It's
a learned skill that requires some effort. More for some than others.
In emacs', defense, it's a helluva lot more intuitive than vi, which
is a nightmare straight from Hell!
nb
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:14:54 -0400
From: jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson)
Subject: Re: The Modernization of Emacs: terminology buffer and keybinding
Message-Id: <87sl8l9qlt.fsf@W0053328.mgh.harvard.edu>
David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
> jadamson@partners.org (Joel J. Adamson) writes:
>> Or, since Emacs is customizable, for me it would be
>>
>> <f1> t
>> <f1> i
>> <f1> ?
>
> Huh? The latter are available by default on Emacs 22.1.
Interesting, maybe I have a telepathetic connection with the
developers; either that or I just kept using the same .emacs when I
upgraded ;)
(I had to change this when I was using Emacs 21.4, since I started
using C-h for backspace)
Joel
--
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA 02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109
A webpage of interest:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sylvester-response.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:22:23 -0700
From: krakle@visto.com
Subject: Re: Trying to make sense of perl for web development.
Message-Id: <1182446543.558130.160050@k79g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
On Jun 21, 7:54 am, cendrizzi <cendri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW, is mod_perl the best way to go? It seems from most things I've
> read to have some nice advantages.
Only you can decide that... Some people who just want some speed
increase will probably enjoy FastCGI since there's "less to be
concerned with" than mod_perl.
But if you want to be able to create Apache modules and/or extend/
modify the apache life cycle PLUS enjoy the speed advantages you will
want to stick with mod_perl.
I'm glad I did. mod_perl also forces you to write CLEAN and STRICT
Perl code. Which is a good thing but at the same time makes it more
difficult for a "newbie".
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:10:30 -0700
From: michaelzhao <mzhao1@gmail.com>
Subject: Using PERL to solve a specific bioinformatics problem
Message-Id: <1182445830.829076.166280@n2g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
Hi, I am an undergraduate research student at Georgia Institute of
Technology. My undergraduate research field falls into bioinformatics.
My professor recently charged me with solving a bioinformatics problem
as a learning process using PERL. I am free to use any and all
resources to solve it. I have never programmed at all before and
learning PERL using the book "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" by O
'Reilly.
I have a set of 30 nucleotides upstream of verified E. coli genes. The
task is to find an efficient way to generate Markov chain transition
matrices for sequences of arbitrary length. Zero, first, and second
order should be sufficient. Also, I need a way to score sequences
against those transition matrices.
I am asking for any helpful tips and hints I should go about doing
this. As this is my first problem I am in the dark a little bit with
no real idea of where to start. Any and all help is appreciated.
Thanks!
~Michael
------------------------------
Date: 21 Jun 2007 17:12:52 GMT
From: Glenn Jackman <glennj@ncf.ca>
Subject: Re: Using PERL to solve a specific bioinformatics problem
Message-Id: <slrnf7lccl.sud.glennj@smeagol.ncf.ca>
At 2007-06-21 01:10PM, "michaelzhao" wrote:
> Hi, I am an undergraduate research student at Georgia Institute of
> Technology. My undergraduate research field falls into bioinformatics.
> My professor recently charged me with solving a bioinformatics problem
> as a learning process using PERL. I am free to use any and all
> resources to solve it. I have never programmed at all before and
> learning PERL using the book "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" by O
> 'Reilly.
Haven't used it myself, but http://www.bioperl.org/ sounds like an
appropriate place to start.
--
Glenn Jackman
"You can only be young once. But you can always be immature." -- Dave Barry
------------------------------
Date: 6 Apr 2001 21:33:47 GMT (Last modified)
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End of Perl-Users Digest V11 Issue 549
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