Religious Conversion
I got into Portland yesterday for OSCon, and I had about an hour to kill before registration started. I unpacked my bags, got things organized, and got settled in. It was about time to get registered, so I hit the conference building which was right across the street from my hotel (yay!) The lines were very short, and they were very organized, so I didn’t spend long getting my badge, books, bag, and starter freebie stuff.
I decided that it was time to eat since it was a little after 5:00, and I hadn’t eaten since 9:30 in the morning (these times are all PST.) I had seen signs in my hotel inviting OSCon guests to hit the Window View room (or something like that) in the top floor (6th floor, not very tall) of the hotel. I decided to hit that since I figured it was a restaurant or something of the kind. Nope. Turned out to be a bar, and I was the first person to show up. I had interrupted the bartender’s reading of the latest Harry Potter book, and I didn’t feel like an ass enough to walk away. I had a few drinks at the bar, and the alcohol started to hit me harder than it should because of the empty stomach. After the second drink, I decided to break off my genuinely engaging conversation with the bartender in search of food.
I hit a burger joint that was across the street, and while waiting for my food a fellow OSCon attendee (I could tell because he had the bag over his shoulder that all attendees were given) walked up and asked if he could join me. I figured that we would talk about geek things and have a good time while eating some burgers. I was never so wrong in my life!
The guy’s sole mission in life seemed to be the conversion of every living being on the planet to the Church of the Latter Day Saints. As most of you know, when I’m drunk (which I was right on the verge of being so) I talk too much. I ended up talking to this guy for about two hours, and he never let up on trying to convert me right there in the middle of the burger joint. Normally, this pisses me off to no end, but I was relaxed and happy and willing to give this guy the time that he wanted. We waxed philosophical about religion for a long while. Now, I can handle myself in most debates, but religion is one of my weak spots. However, I can take almost every religious tenant and boil it down to a philosophical standpoint. I’m pretty damn good at philosophy, so I held my own against this guy. In the end he didn’t want to give up, but was tired of the verbal fencing, so he changed the topic…..
….. to which editor I used: vi or emacs.
He stated up front that he thought that emacs was a superior product. I wasn’t listening closely, and I stated that I prefer vi to emacs. I explained to him that I did give emacs two weeks of solid us, and then vi two weeks of solid use when deciding between the two. I told him that I prefer vi (actually vim) over emacs as a “text editor.” He countered that emacs was a better product because it offered seamless remote mounting, built-in diff mode, lisp mode, a wrapper around the bash shell to capture output, etc.
My counter to that was that emacs may have all of those features, but I just want a text editor that is superior at editing text. If I wanted those other things, then I would get products that do those other things. He started talking about a variety of features that it has, and I countered with Perl for all of them. There is nothing that emacs can do that Perl can’t do better, faster, and with more flexibility. He stated that emacs can do all of these things and create new files with all of these new features. I explained to him that I have yet to find a Unix shell that can’t redirect the output of a command to a text file. As a matter of fact, I prefer the ability to use multiple pipes to get what I want before redirecting it to a text file… and then editing it in vi which has superior text editing capabilities.
In the end, he tired of being unable to convince me of either of his religions (LDS or emacs) and begged off saying that it was late. I was glad when he broke off our long conversation because I was getting tired of him (even though he was a really nice guy) and I really had to pee.
Oddly enough, the “conversion attempt” that upset me the most was not him trying to get me to join LDS, but his attempt to convince me that emacs was superior to vi. I guess that’s because my religious faith and his are rooted in the same principles (with, perhaps, some different execution), but emacs and vi are horrible different and never the twain shall meet.
