[HN Gopher] EmacsConf 2021 - Live Now
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       EmacsConf 2021 - Live Now
        
       Author : hprotagonist
       Score  : 129 points
       Date   : 2021-11-27 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (live.emacsconf.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (live.emacsconf.org)
        
       | chaoz_ wrote:
       | I might ask a dumb questions - but why is this conf not streamed
       | on Twitch? It could help acquire new audience.
        
         | seanw444 wrote:
         | To BeetleB's point, Emacs is free and open source software. I'm
         | sure they wouldn't want to use a non free and open source
         | network/streaming service to deliver the video.
        
           | josteink wrote:
           | I fully agree with that.
           | 
           | But I'd appreciate it they streamed in formats I could play
           | on my iPhone.
           | 
           | Does anyone have a direct video-link I can pass to VLC?
        
         | Buttons840 wrote:
         | Because nobody has restreamed it there yet.
        
         | BeetleB wrote:
         | Is Twitch "free"?
        
           | taeric wrote:
           | Even if not, you could probably get donations to put quite a
           | few of these up there. Seems a really good idea.
        
             | noir_lord wrote:
             | Wrong type of free I think.
        
               | taeric wrote:
               | Fair, I actually did assume that it costs money to put
               | some videos up on twitch.
               | 
               | In other ways, though, I'm not actually clear that they
               | lock you in much. Such that I'm not sure how it is any
               | less free than most any other alternative.
               | 
               | Consider, it is basically the idea to use the town hall
               | to host a local event.
        
               | convolvatron wrote:
               | except that its _not_ a public facility, and I dont see
               | why we have to admit that kind of ambiguity just so that
               | someone else can make a buck off of our work.
               | 
               | serving video is essentially free as in beer, and I'm
               | pretty sure the FSF can afford to stand up a server.
               | 
               | i dont know why people are so eager to involve these
               | services in their lives - i assure you, you can hold your
               | own dick when you pee - its not that bad.
        
               | BeetleB wrote:
               | > except that its _not_ a public facility
               | 
               | While town halls are public facilities, most rental halls
               | are decidedly not. I think that was the point of the
               | comment: If they were holding this event in person, would
               | they refuse to do it in most facilities?
               | 
               | > i assure you, you can hold your own dick when you pee -
               | its not that bad.
               | 
               | Comments like this are flamebait and, as an observer,
               | quite unwarranted in this thread.
        
               | taeric wrote:
               | Ignoring where crowds are is a touch silly.
        
       | davydog187 wrote:
       | I wish I had time to watch! Will these be recorded?
        
         | erk__ wrote:
         | I think it will all be possible to access on their youtube at
         | least https://www.youtube.com/c/EmacsConf
        
         | hprotagonist wrote:
         | All talks are prerecorded and will be uploaded after the
         | conference to the conference website. curl or mpv them later at
         | your leisure!
        
       | b3morales wrote:
       | The Kindle talk sounds interesting:
       | https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/dashboard/ I have a an older
       | Kindle hanging around that I'd be happy to get some new life out
       | of with a little hacking.
        
       | robertbmenke wrote:
       | I love the emacs philosophy. Doom emacs with evil mode is a
       | gorgeous experience. However, once LSP and a few plugins are
       | running it's just too slow to use. I hope one day we'll have a
       | multi-threaded version of emacs that can compete with VSCode,
       | JetBrains, and Xcode.
        
         | 7kay wrote:
         | Do you use the native-comp branch of emacs? This probably
         | doesn't make any difference when it comes to multithreading but
         | it should make the experience a bit more smooth.
        
       | amichail wrote:
       | Isn't it time for everyone to move on to TeXmacs, not only for
       | WYSIWYG editing of scientific/math documents, but also for note
       | taking and even programming?
        
         | convolvatron wrote:
         | ok. that looks interesting. will try, do you think there are
         | any downsides in trying to use this as a general purpose
         | programming environment?
         | 
         | edit: whoa - you mean I can't use normal emacs cursor movement?
         | no thanks, emacs for me is all about no menus and no modality.
        
         | ravi-delia wrote:
         | Is it? First time I've ever heard of it, although looking at it
         | I must say I am intrigued. What would you say are its main
         | positive features?
        
           | amichail wrote:
           | It's currently an amazing way to write math/science documents
           | in a truly WYSIWYG editor.
        
         | false-mirror wrote:
         | What would the incentive be for a current emacs user? It's hard
         | to imagine giving up org-mode would ever be worthwhile
         | personally.
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | Yeah. I liked it when I used it, but it's not actually an
           | emacs replacement in a general sense. There's a much smaller
           | community and set of extensions (plug-ins in their term,
           | packages in emacs). It was pleasant to use as a notebook
           | front-end with Maxima and Octave when I used them.
        
           | amichail wrote:
           | Maybe someone could write a WYSIWYG org-mode for TeXmacs.
        
         | Koshkin wrote:
         | TeXmacs is amazing but has been staying in a relative obscurity
         | for some reason. It could be a great tool for the so-called
         | literal programming. (Curiously, TeXmacs has little to do with
         | TeX or emacs.)
        
         | alex_smart wrote:
         | TeXmacs for programming?!
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | If you do literate programming or work with a REPL, sure.
           | 
           | https://www.nongnu.org/fangle/examples/hello-world.pdf
        
       | Mikeb85 wrote:
       | Nice to know the Emacs community is as active as ever. It's a
       | great extensible environment.
        
       | y7 wrote:
       | Here is a list of all the talks, with videos of the ones that
       | have finished: https://emacsconf.org/2021/schedule/
        
       | enbugger wrote:
       | Is there VIM conf?
        
         | travisbhartwell wrote:
         | There was a Vim conference last month: https://www.vimconf.live
        
       | earthscienceman wrote:
       | Was there not, at some point, a disagreement among the emacs
       | developers about how this conference was being managed?
       | 
       | As an aside, emacs has so much potential, I'm so glad the
       | community continues to thrive. I use emacs exclusively for
       | science data analysis and consistently impress my colleagues with
       | how quickly things can be accomplished. If rough edges were
       | polished in some of the python corners there could easily be an
       | emacs renaissance in academia, a la nicolas rougier et al.
       | 
       | For just how popular python is in science now, the workflows are
       | abysmal at best. 2 out of 3 of my colleagues won't touch it
       | because Anaconda makes no sense, a command line work flow is too
       | obtuse, and Matlab for all its disgusting nature is at least
       | "natural" to work with as an _environment_ in some sense. Which
       | makes me sad. I have dreams that emacs makes that more
       | approachable.
        
         | ashton314 wrote:
         | Just came here to plug Nicolas Rougier. He's got some fantastic
         | and very pretty-looking Emacs packages. He's got good ideas of
         | where Emacs should be in terms of usability in my opinion.
         | 
         | https://github.com/rougier
        
         | Folcon wrote:
         | This is interesting, I had the impression that notebooks were
         | crossing this gap, are there specific command line issues that
         | are a big bottleneck? Is it just better dependency management
         | that's the big command line problem for example?
        
           | taeric wrote:
           | Notebooks are abysmal when it comes to state management. And
           | that includes state of data access, as well as state of
           | dependencies.
        
         | plafl wrote:
         | In any complex field, say data science or software development,
         | any newcomer perceives the solutions to problems they still
         | don't have as unnecessary complexity. So for example the whole
         | idea of dependency management, environments or version control
         | will get in their way. Because it's not yet their problem. They
         | are solving simpler problems: how I run this simple script (or
         | with Emacs, say, undo this change, etc...). In that regard
         | Matlab excels at making it easy for newcomers and harder later.
         | 
         | We need gradual complexity, but I think it's very hard to
         | design. It needs knowledge + didactic capability.
        
         | Mikeb85 wrote:
         | Honestly I've never understood Python for data analysis. R and
         | Matlab have way better environments. R Studio is quite possibly
         | the best environment I've ever used, in any language. Even
         | creating C++ modules with Rcpp is easy. Julia is also getting
         | there with a lot of natural advantages over R, Matlab or
         | Python. I just don't get why anyone uses Python in this domain.
        
           | auxym wrote:
           | Matlab is awful at being a general-purpose language, anything
           | that isn't wrangling matrices. Strings, paths, networking,
           | etc are all really painful compared to Python or Julia.
        
           | smitty1e wrote:
           | Python proper is terrible for analyzing data at scale.
           | 
           | It's the numpy, scipy, jupyter tools, as well as Anaconda,
           | that make the sale.
           | 
           | Too, it's not just the analysis, but the
           | extract/transform/load (ETL) beforehand. Python's general
           | purpose wealth of tools had me transforming the FCC antenna
           | coverage .zip[1] to shapefile and parking it in a spatialite
           | file for QGIS in a relative jiffy.
           | 
           | Doubtless I could do all that in Julia or R, but I get to
           | hone my python-fu at the office doing cloud stuff by day--
           | another argument in favor of the general-purpose tool.
           | 
           | [1] ftp://ftp.fcc.gov/pub/Bureaus/MB/Databases/fm_service_con
           | tour_data/FM_service_contour_current.zip
        
             | taeric wrote:
             | I argue that what makes the sale, is that that is what so
             | many in the field are using. Not much inherent to the
             | technologies, but you are taking on a daunting task if you
             | want to compete with pytorch, instead of using it.
        
               | agumonkey wrote:
               | But we can assume people got on python/numpy stack
               | because it brought some value compared to R. I'm not a
               | big fan of numpy but I find it a bit shallow to think
               | it's mostly follower effect at play. It might be though..
               | but that would be sad. Maybe Julia will bring balance
               | back in the universe.
        
               | smitty1e wrote:
               | Network effects: we got 'em.
        
           | harha wrote:
           | Not having access to a good R environment at work is one big
           | reason.
           | 
           | At the company I work at there's a pypi mirror with quite
           | recent packages and it works out of the box - for R there's
           | only an ancient version and some hacks to get it to work with
           | juptyer notebooks.
        
             | Mikeb85 wrote:
             | ?? Can't use RStudio?
        
         | natrys wrote:
         | I have been a happy R + ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) user for
         | a while now. I think ESS also supports python, I have no
         | personal experience with that though. But I can agree that
         | whenever I am forced to use Jupyter notebooks, it feel awfully
         | unergonomic in comparison.
        
           | clircle wrote:
           | Strongly Agree! ESS is an incredible environment for
           | statistical work, but I don't think it supports Python. There
           | is some minimal support for Julia, but it's not quite as well
           | supported as R.
        
             | natrys wrote:
             | Ah, looks like you are right and indeed ESS doesn't support
             | python, a shame. As for Julia, I think a package that is
             | shaping up to be interesting and along the same spirit is:
             | https://github.com/gcv/julia-snail
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-27 23:01 UTC)