WEBVTT
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Welcome to my talk,
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Moldable Emacs: A Step Towards
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Sustainable Software.
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Who am I?
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I am Andrea.
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I work as a Clojure software engineer
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somewhere in the middle of the UK.
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I inherited my passion for Emacs
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from my Ph.D. supervisor,
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and from that moment on,
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I got in synergy with it.
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You can learn more about my interests
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and my Emacs adventure
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at ag91.github.io.
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So let's get in the talk.
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Why moldable development?
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There is too much information to read it all.
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Reading is very difficult.
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It's a very slow activity.
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You need to go word by word
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or paragraph by paragraph,
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if you speedread.
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But anyway, you take a lot of time
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to absorb that information.
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And we urgently need
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to stand on the shoulders of giants,
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so the idea is we should stop
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doing always the same errors
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and we should be able to
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absorb as much of the good ideas
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that the bright people around us generate.
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For example, if I create
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a magnificent program in COBOL,
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and nobody knows any more
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how to learn or read COBOL,
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(and in order to read,
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you take a lot of time),
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well, that fantastic idea
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should be easily translatable
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to C, or to Clojure,
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or to Common Lisp,
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or to a language that will come after.
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The idea shouldn't be lost
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in a codebase somewhere in an old mainframe.
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It should be still accessible.
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Let's get in practice. What does it mean?
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It means that, for example,
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the proponents of moldable development
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prepare this slide to give a sense.
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So the idea is... Look at this.
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What is here? You will see
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that all these little things
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look like the same.
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The first time I looked at it,
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this was looking like a class diagram.
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This is actually code
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describing a little system.
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If you look and if you read,
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you can see that there is a numerator,
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a denominator... So this, you see,
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is interactive, because it's code.
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It's something that is running,
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and it's an object
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because this is Smalltalk --
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Pharo, a dialect of Smalltalk --
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but in the next slide,
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since this is a moldable tool,
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you can see that you can...
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there is a representation
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of the same software
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in a human way.
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So, for example,
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here you can see
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there is a mathematical formula.
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The other object, the second one,
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was a file system kind of thing.
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The third one was an image.
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And the last one was sort of a graph.
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So you can see that
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there is a better way to learn,
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to distinguish, to intuitively get a sense.
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And there is not only a single way.
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It's custom to what you need.
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For example, this is
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a very general way
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to understand what is this object about
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and maybe you want to see
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some other little things.
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For example, the documentation of the code,
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because you are interested
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in developing with it.
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For example, an image,
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you can see there's a path
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on the filesystem,
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or as a hexadecimal representation.
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In a sense, there is not only one view.
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You need to have the view
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that you need at the moment,
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and your tool needs to
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make this easy for you.
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So, why moldable Emacs?
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I wanted to bring that idea
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of having multiple view representations
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of what you need
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to understand better in Emacs.
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And so I want to create immediate story telling.
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Immediate, because it needs to be very quick,
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and story telling is
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because you want to allow connection
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from something that you needed
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to develop it into something new.
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So you are really telling a story:
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what is this mathematical formula
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I created because I need this,
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or this numerator and denominator
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produce this number.
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So this is a story that you are telling
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in my mind.
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And I want multiple views for buffers.
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Buffers is the main concept in Emacs,
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and so buffers are what I want to
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integrate in a story.
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I create a buffer
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and I start manipulating it,
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creating a view and then another view
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in order to tell something to myself,
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in order to learn,
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but also to tell something to others.
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So, for example, let's start
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from a use case: learning better.
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I had, at work, a list of changes
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for a pull request,
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so a code change,
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and I was very tired.
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I couldn't understand
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what this much text was about.
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So what I generate,
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I create a value for myself
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to understand it easily.
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And for me, understanding it easily,
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for example, was a little flow diagram.
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It showed me, okay, there is first
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this, this, and this,
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and so I could follow.
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having it next to the change.
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Having this image next to the change.
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And this is describing
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an Italian recipe for pasta with butter,
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so if you want to try, you're welcome.
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It's very tasty.
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Anyway, the other thing that we can do
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is query text -- structured text.
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So for example, this presentation
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is an Org Mode buffer.
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So when I call the Playground
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(that is one of the molds
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that lets me write some Elisp to query
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the original buffer,)
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if I evaluate this,
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you will see that
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I have just asked
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my Org Mode buffer
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to tell me the content length
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of the headings
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with some interesting content.
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So all the headings at third-level.
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Do you understand? I've just asked a file
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to tell me its contents
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without reading it.
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Or we can do something similar for code.
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We can do... I don't know...
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No idea what is written there,
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but I want to know
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which function is the most complex
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or is overcomplicated.
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I have defined in red,
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(so again, I don't need to read the number
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to know either what it is about!)
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So, I've written in red,
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I've shown in red
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the function with more complexity,
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and I can jump to it.
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So everything is very accessible
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to facilitate my operation
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and my understanding.
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Or I can take notes.
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For example, I can annotate something,
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and you see the note
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is again structured text,
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because you will know
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that I'm going to query my notes
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at some point.
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For example, I can show all my notes,
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for example, by mode, or I can show
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all the notes by mode in Org Mode.
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Because it's structured text,
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I can manipulate it very easily.
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So these are all my notes.
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Finally, the superpower
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of this moldable Emacs
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is the fact that you can compose molds.
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So, for example, let's go in
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showing all my notes.
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Let me show you all my notes.
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And then let's say that I want to know
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how they are... how many lines
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are these notes?
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Look, this is the answer.
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So of all the notes I take,
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I can actually query it and say
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"What are the lengths?"
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But let me show something more.
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Which one is the longest note?
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Now there are lots of notes in there
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so it's difficult to know
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but what if I can, in a click,
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generate a view that is very immediate?
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Look, there is a note that is very long.
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It's about 35 lines.
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Do you understand?
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I didn't read any note.
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This is all coming from
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being able to query your text
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and having multiple representations.
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My presentation is very short.
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What is next?
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Next is to integrate molds with other software
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like code-compass.
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I did a presentation last year
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and I want to make those nice diagrams
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available for small molds
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so that you can use them,
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for example, for notes
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or text that you have.
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To integrate better
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with Nyxt, the Common Lisp browser,
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because there's a lot of opportunity there
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to make funny things,
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a browser accessible for molding,
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and then having some interaction with Smalltalk
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through Glamorous Toolkit,
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so that we can have the best tools,
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Emacs and Glamorous Toolkit and Nyxt
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and others, to work together
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to make our learning easy.
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Then... You've seen the tool;
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my molds that I have shown
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were basically by buffer.
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I want project statistics.
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What about... Give me the complexity
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of all the functions
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in a project,
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of all the paragraphs, whatever.
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And then there is a nice issue on
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my issue-tracker for moldable Emacs
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is about: "Emacs: tell me how can I
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compose the molds that I have
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to make new things?"
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It is a sort of a research-y thing
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that is pretty cool.
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So if you want to learn more,
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just check out at ag91.github.io,
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check out moldable Emacs on GitHub,
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and enjoy the rest of the conference.
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Bye.
