WEBVTT
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Hello everyone. My name is Grant Shangreaux,
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and I'm happy to be back here at EmacsConf.
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So before I was a programmer professionally,
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I was a Montessori guide with young children,
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and now I'm a parent of a child
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in a Montessori classroom.
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I was thinking Emacs
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and Montessori philosophy
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are both fundamentally about respect.
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Respect children, for the child
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is the parent to the adult.
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And we should respect users.
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Maybe the user is the parent
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to the hacker. That was certainly my case.
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So this talk is about the similarities
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between the Emacs environment
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and the Montessori classroom,
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which is called a prepared environment,
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meaning that everything in the environment
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has been prepared for the child to come
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and interact with in a meaningful way.
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The child will be driven
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by natural human tendencies
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to interact with their environment
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and to construct and refine
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their understanding of the world
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and the things in it.
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What I hope you come away from this talk with
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is just a new perspective
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on Emacs and software,
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and how users interact
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in a prepared environment like Emacs
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following their human tendencies
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to gain understanding
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and reach toward perfection.
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Okay. So the human tendencies
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are innate drives present in everybody.
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They're what enable us to explore
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and make sense of our world.
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We use these human tendencies
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to construct and refine the world itself.
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You know, if you're an Emacs user,
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I hope that's ringing some bells for you
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right away, because what we do
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when we interact with Emacs as individuals
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is construct and refine our world in Emacs.
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So I'm going to go through
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the human tendencies one by one
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and bring up things
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that I have observed or noticed in Emacs.
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I'm sure there's plenty more.
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Feel free to share it in chat.
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So number one is orientation.
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Human beings want to know their relationship
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to the environment around them.
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With children, when they come into
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a new environment, they want to look at it,
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touch everything around them.
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They want to know where they fit in,
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things like that.
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In Emacs, the easiest thing to think of
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is the initial new Emacs buffer.
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Right away, that is giving you
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some guideposts to orient yourself.
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If you've used any of the other
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Emacs starter packages, different packages
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take different approaches to this.
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I think if you're trying to get people
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to use Emacs for some reason,
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thinking about how individuals
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might orient themselves
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to this new software world is important.
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I think that there are friendly ways
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to welcome people into the environment
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and to make it easier for people
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to orient themselves within Emacs.
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Of course we've also got the Info manuals,
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and one of my favorite examples
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is the which-key package, which,
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when you press a key,
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it'll pop up with all of the following
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key bindings that are available.
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That's a really important way for me
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to explore, which is another human tendency,
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or to orient myself;
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to think about when I press this key,
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now I've got these possibilities.
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You see that all over in Emacs
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with hydras or the Magit transient buffers.
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There's all sorts of ways
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that Emacs is trying to help us
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orient ourselves.
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The second tendency is order, which
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I probably should have talked about first,
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but here I am. I myself am not
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particularly attuned to order,
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but when I was in the Montessori classroom,
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I found that it wasn't necessarily myself
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imposing the order, it was...
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The environment itself
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has a certain order to it,
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and by creating an environment
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where everything has its place,
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and everything has its time,
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and you have a way of doing things,
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it makes it easier for the child
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to develop that internal sense of order
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and succeed at imposing order
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upon their work, which...
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We do that as programmers.
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If we're contributing to Emacs,
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we try to do so in an orderly way,
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use prefixes for namespacing,
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since we don't have that ability
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in Emacs Lisp,
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and by sharing well-ordered
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self-documenting programs with our community.
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Number three is exploration. I think
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exploration is what drew me into Emacs,
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personally. In the beginning,
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it was just this wondrous
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software environment
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that offered so many opportunities.
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I was curious. Like, you've got
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your scratch buffer.
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You can explore in there with expressions.
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You can start up IELM.
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You can explore your file system with Dired.
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You can explore different packages
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with list-packages. There's so many ways
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you can explore in Emacs.
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For me, that was very delightful.
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It really resonated with my bias
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of exploration and human tendencies.
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Places to explore in Emacs are wonderful,
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and eventually you get down
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into the source code, and it's great.
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And then we've got communication.
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I think communication kind of
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speaks for itself as well.
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Emacs is software.
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Software is a form of communication.
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We're all driven to communicate.
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That's why we're here at this conference.
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Within Emacs, you've got lots of ways
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to communicate. You've got IRC clients,
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mail, you've got news readers.
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You could use Org.
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I even started working on a magazine in Org
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that I was going to distribute
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via live Debian CDs back in the day.
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So I think Emacs for communication
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is pretty clear.
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Activity. So Activities is just
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a natural thing when you're...
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You see it in children. Right?
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Children always find something to do
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to keep busy, whether they're pretending,
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or running around, or moving.
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You don't have to have a goal
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or end-product in mind.
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People are just active.
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You do things. I find that in Emacs,
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all the time, when I don't know
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what to work on, sometimes I just go
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into Emacs and hack around and, like,
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change things in my config.
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I'm sure we've all been there.
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So Emacs encourages and enables
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that kind of activity as well.
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Manipulation is the next one.
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So Lisp. Anyone? The fact that Emacs is
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this live Lisp process that's running,
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that you can manipulate at your fingertips...
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You couldn't ask for something better.
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I think the malleability of Emacs
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is why people love it.
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Clearly, the environment of Emacs
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was prepared with manipulation in mind
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from the very start.
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We'll go through these next ones
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pretty quickly.
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We've got work or purposeful activity.
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Emacs would not exist
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without this human tendency.
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it's been worked on
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by free software volunteers
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for 40 years, and this is the kind of
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self-motivated work that inspired me
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to be a hacker.
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Repetition is another human tendency.
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I think that one kind of speaks for itself.
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It's this tendency that gave me
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Emacs pinky after learning all of those
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key bindings, and then that same tendency
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drove me to learn another modal key mapping
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to deal with that. I've repeated myself,
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starting over new Emacs configs
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several times. I could give another example,
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but I'll just be repeating myself
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at this point.
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And then exactness. So we have a tendency,
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a human tendency toward exactness.
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That's not one that's very strong for me.
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I'm not a super exacting person.
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But I think you can see that in Emacs,
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like certain parts of it
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have been refined down to exactness.
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I know when I'm working,
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sometimes it's just the theme that I choose
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or making sure the mode line
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is exactly the way I want it...
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You know, getting that environment
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to feel conducive to thought and work
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is important to me.
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And then we have abstraction, which...
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That one goes pretty deep,
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but I think you can see
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how abstraction works in Emacs.
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A buffer is an abstraction.
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One of the great things about Emacs
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and about Montessori philosophy
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is that these abstractions
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might not be something
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you need to think about right away,
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but they're there, right,
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like the fact that a buffer abstracts
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over working with text.
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Once that becomes clear to you,
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once you have a reason to manipulate it,
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having the abstraction of the buffer there
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to work with makes a huge difference.
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And then of course,
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we can create our own abstractions:
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transients, pop-up buffers, hydras...
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I'm sure there's plenty of examples
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in chat that I can't come up with.
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And finally, perfection.
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All of the human tendencies
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culminate in this one.
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Perfection doesn't mean
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like you just have to make
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this perfect shining idealistic thing.
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It's about perfecting what we do.
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I think everybody who's worked with Emacs
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for a long time,
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you perfect your configuration.
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Sometimes you tear it down and start over.
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If you're working on a package,
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you perfect that,
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and it's an ongoing process.
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An example I can think of are
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like raxod502's packages.
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straight.el is an attempt at perfecting
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the package management system in Emacs,
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and he's taken a stab at
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several other common things,
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like incremental selection and so on.
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These aren't necessarily finished problems.
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There's room for perfection,
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and we have a human tendency to pursue that.
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I hope this talk
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has gotten you thinking about
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how Emacs and the Montessori classroom
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are similar--they're both
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prepared environments
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that call upon our human tendencies
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to construct and refine our world--
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and how Emacs respects us as users
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in the hopes that we will grow up into
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creative hackers.
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Thank you for listening.
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I'm happy to answer any questions
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after the talk.
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[captions by sachac]
