http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1414220
Congratulations and well done!
Cheers,
JC.
On 3/26/2007, "Jacques Chester" jacques@chester.id.au wrote:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1414220
Congratulations and well done!
The problem is, it's an awful review. Not awful in the sense that it's unfavorable to TextMate or the book (the author seems like both), but just plain bad:
"TextMate is a closed-source, GUI-based, extensible text editor that looks and behaves like a mashup of GNU Emacs ("Emacs") and NetBeans."
Really?
And without a single link to macromates.com, the review leaves no place for the reader to go but into the comments, where a debate about the merits and legality of copying the look and feel of emacs roars on: "Ok so this is a closed source Emacs clone? Who the heck would want that? 1. Emacs sucks 2. paying for it is crazy 3. why is it closed source?"
-Alan
On Mar 26, 2007, at 3:05 PM, Alan Schussman wrote:
The problem is, it's an awful review. Not awful in the sense that it's unfavorable to TextMate or the book (the author seems like both), but just plain bad:
I'll second that! First, the review jumps back and forth from reviewing James' book to reviewing TextMate. Second, he approaches TextMate from a very limited point of view - to paraphrase a couple of parts:
"I'm learning how to do Ruby on Rails, so TextMate is a Ruby on Rails IDE." That's news to me. I thought it was a text editor that supported a (virtually) unlimited list of languages.
"It's basically an Emacs clone." I have stated (somewhere) in the past that TextMate is Emacs for OS X. By that, I mean that it is the ultimate in configurable editors - if TextMate doesn't do what you want it to do, you can create a bundle that does what you want. However, it is not an Emacs clone, as far as I can tell - and the look and feel is definitely not "Emacs-like." From my limited exposure, Emacs has a much steeper learning curve and has a lot of functionality that (I hope) TextMate will never have.
Lastly, I couldn't tell if the guy liked the book or not. It seemed as if his strongest praise was for its size.
Bottom line - I love TextMate, and James' book is allowing me to do even more with it!
Mike
Alan Schussman wrote:
The problem is, it's an awful review. Not awful in the sense that it's unfavorable to TextMate or the book (the author seems like both), but just plain bad: [...]
And without a single link to macromates.com, the review leaves no place for the reader to go but into the comments, where a debate about the merits and legality of copying the look and feel of emacs roars on: "Ok so this is a closed source Emacs clone? Who the heck would want that? 1. Emacs sucks 2. paying for it is crazy 3. why is it closed source?"
-Alan
Go add some of your own comments then, setting the record straight? :)
-Jacob
On 3/26/2007, "Jacob Rus" jrus@hcs.harvard.edu wrote:
Go add some of your own comments then, setting the record straight? :)
Done. And I didn't mean to sound mean-spirited. I just thought it was unfortunate that a user who clearly likes like both TextMate and James's book conveyed what I think were precisely the wrong things to the Slashdot crowd, setting the discussion off on the wrong foot. The balance seems to be tilting however.
-Alan
Alan Schussman wrote:
On 3/26/2007, "Jacques Chester" jacques@chester.id.au wrote:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1414220
Congratulations and well done!
The problem is, it's an awful review. Not awful in the sense that it's unfavorable to TextMate or the book (the author seems like both), but just plain bad:
Welcome to book reviews on Slashdot
On Mar 26, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Jacques Chester wrote:
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1414220
Congratulations and well done!
Thanks for the pointer and thanks to all who have been writing favorable blog posts around the net. I've been happily reading everyone I can find.
James Edward Gray II
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James Edward Gray II wrote:
On Mar 26, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Jacques Chester wrote:
James, thanks again for this book.
As a sidenote:
What is excellent and elegant, is always difficult to grasp from a crowdy angle. It's like a natural law.
It obviously takes some time, to read the book first, and have some fun with it. (which I did, and will do again)
regards, marios
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Alan Schussman -
Jacob Rus -
Jacques Chester -
James Edward Gray II -
marios -
Mike Mellor -
Rick Gigger