I love the way #Emacs can be a haven for power users and tinkerers.

[sacha@social.sachachua.com]

I love the way #Emacs can be a haven for power users and tinkerers. Let's figure out how we can get even better at helping people learn how to make their own tools.

From https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

"The YouTube tutorial is the perfect emblem of this rot. Tutorials are not documentation. A tutorial teaches you to perform a specific sequence of steps to achieve a specific outcome. The steps are usually correct for the specific scenario the tutorial covers. If your scenario differs — if something’s changed, if you get an error the tutorial didn’t anticipate, if you’re using a different version — the tutorial has given you no tools to respond. Documentation teaches you to understand a system: what its components are, how they interact, what the configuration options mean and why they exist, what the error messages indicate. One produces people who can follow instructions. The other produces people who understand what they’re doing. The industry has enthusiastically replaced the latter with the former and called it democratization."

"Close off the tinkering and you close off the pipeline. What you get instead is a generation of developers who’ve only ever worked within platform constraints, who’ve never pushed against the edges of the abstractions they’ve been given, who treat framework behavior as ground truth rather than implementation detail. They build more constrained platforms, because the constraints are all they know, for the next generation to be hemmed in by. The technical capability of the field decays, quietly, generation by generation, because the informal education pathway — break things, fix them, understand them — has been systematically closed by platforms that have every financial incentive to keep it closed."

Found via https://johnjohnston.info/blog/liked-the-slow-death-of-the-power-user-fireborn/