path: root/2021/captions/emacsconf-2021-montessori--emacs-and-montessori-philosophy--grant-shangreaux--main.vtt

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]