On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 10:30:09AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > There are some hints at this in the GNU GPL (e.g. the sources have > > to be made available in their "preferred form"), but it goes much > > further, I think. > > As a long time Emacs hacker I can only agree. satisfying the legal part > of the definition of "Free Software" is just the first step. If you > care about "Free as in Free speech" you also want to go through extra > trouble to help your users becomes hackers/developers.
Emacs is pretty special in this department. There is a key which takes you to a function documentation (so far, so good), but from there you can jump to that function's source, be it elisp or C. > Rather than focus on providing a slick&seamless experience you want to > focus on exposing your users to the program's source code. It comes > with its own downsides, of course. > > E.g. Emacs has not been internationalized yet, and it's not completely > clear that it should: to internationalize it well, we'd need for example > to replace `M-x` with something that uses translated command names > rather than using the names used in the source code. That would be > helpful for non-English users, obviously, but that would also make it > harder for them to know what to write in their `.emacs` and to > understand Emacs' source code. There's a funny anecdote for that: Back Then (TM) (it was Windows 3.1, Wikipedia says 1992 or thereabouts) Apple had this cool scripting language (was it Applescript?). It had a tokenized internal representation (was fashionable at the time). Of course, it was easy for them to localize the keywords, and they did [1]. Microsoft must have seen that and thought "Oooooh, we want that too". And they did (WinWord Basic or something). The snag was that this one only had a textual representation. The effect of all of this was that macros written in the USA couldn't run on a German computer (and vice versa, of course). Some kind of Midas touch, I guess. Cheers [1] I'm not sure this is a good idea. I lean on the side "it's not". -- t
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