The Rake and its Prongs (2024)

christiantietze.de

11 points·cenazoic··2 comments

Cute, I guess, but this is the distinction between the language of the model and language of the implementation (the author sort of arrives at this distinction at the end). Programming involves modeling in some language. The model is mental. We model and simulate using a language (still mental).

Now, we incidentally also have these neat devices that can simulate some language for us that we can target it with a compiler. But the point is that while the implementation language may be composed of certain constructs, we can use them to simulate others.

So in the model language, or the user’s UI language, we have cursors that can exist in the in-between visually. The rake exists in the implementation language, but this doesn’t make it any more or less real than the super-rake or whatever of the model language.

I don’t know, I read it as more of a meditation on ‘writing out of range’, both literally as per language constructs, as you mentioned, and metaphorically, as in ‘we’re in the wild blue yonder of weird nowhere now.’

That said, I’m a newbie to Emacs, and I belatedly (after posting the link here) remembered reading something about ‘the point’ in Emacs:

“By default, the cursor in the selected window is drawn as a solid block and appears to be on a character, but you should think of point as between two characters; it is situated before the character under the cursor. ”[^1]

Which made me think maybe things are even weirder than the author thinks. :)

[^1](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Po...)

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