Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/6

 Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: At the time, I was working in America at another institute. They had this great set up, because this was an institute behind a fence, so everybody who was in there was completely security-approved. Inside, everything basically was easily accessible for everything.

For example, they had a printer queue there. You could just take a document and print it to that queue. At the next morning, this thing would be bound as a book on your table.

Sacha: Wow. Carsten: Or you could print images to a slide printer, and they would make slides out of it and just put it back on your table. That was really fantastic.

I used that to print a couple of manuals. I was just casually looking at a Calc manual and then printed it. It came back like a pile this size. It was this gigantic book. It totally sucked me in. I took this book and I read it over the weekend, from the first to the last page, the entire book, because I thought it was written so amazing.

Sacha: It's hilarious.

Carsten: Yes. I started reading the code which is amazing. Everybody always says that codes should be documented, it should have lots of comments, it should have documentation things. Well, you would be amazed. I don't know if you have ever looked at the code of Calc. There are no comments in there, there are no documentation strings for most of the functions, but you can still read it. This amazed me so much.

It told me that a person who has enough clarity in their head when writing code, they even can make code readable without putting a lot of extra commands and documentations. So it was really amazing. I totally fell in love with this program and just started studying and using it. I'm using it to this day.

It's such an amazing marriage of two worlds. On the one hand, he has made this –– he started out–actually maybe just a little detour, if you read his introduction toward the manual or to the tutorial, he said that he was just trying to write this in order to find out what – I don't know, whatever it was,