Re: Permission to submit HOWTO

["Anthony E. Greene" <agreene@pobox.com>]

At 14:09 2000-06-13 -0700, Gary Preckshot wrote:
>I'll say it here: refusing to use more
>capable tools is holding you back.

Each person must decide whether making the capital investment involved in
learning another tool is worthwhile. One day I'll take the time to learn
emacs because I've heard often that it's a very powerful tool. But I'm fast
enough using vim and nedit that I don't think it would be worthwhile to
take the time to learn another editor right now.

I've written so much HTML documentation that writing simple DocBook
documents presented almost no learning curve. A tool that helps select tags
is not that big an improvement over knowledge of the most used subset of
DocBook tags (picked up incrementally when creating the first document),
decent typing skills, and syntax highlighting using an already familiar tool.

I've been disappointed with the results I've gotten from editors that
purport to be helpful. I've found them to be, almost without exception, a
waste of time. Besides the barely readable mess they usually produce, they
tend to make learning easier at the expense of making continued use harder.

That track record affects my decisions about what tools to use. No doubt
others have similar experiences.

You may not agree with those decisions, but that doesn't mean they're
invalid for the people making them.


 Tony
 --
 Anthony E. Greene <agreene@pobox.com>
 PGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26  C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D
 Linux: The choice of a GNU Generation.


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