Re: Emacs learning curve

[Óscar Fuentes]

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> writes:

> You are conflating two separate issue, one of terminology, and one of
> non-working features, so are many people in this thread.

Not really. The terminology is just a small part of the whole issue,
which is the kind of people Emacs development should target. Here on the
Bikeshedding Paradise (a.k.a. emacs-devel) it is understandable that
people tend to see this as a debate on terminology and ignore the really
important issue, but let's try to not do that.

[snip]

> Regarding features, this is infact what people are having problems
> with, like yourself and _not_ about terminology.  The most basic
> prerequisite for any feature is that it should work without any
> configuration, one shouldn't have to define what a tetromino is to
> play tetris even though your tetromino might be different from mine.

I'm glad you think like this. I have the impression that some prominent
hackers here think that it is a good thing and a show of distinction to
produce systems that require reading a manual and do quite a bit of
tinkering before usage. This is a symptom of the hacker's limitations,
of course. He implicitly acknowledges that designing the system on a way
that does not require that burden from the user was too much for him
(there is no derogatory intention towards any Emacs hacker here)

> In your case, CEDET not working out of the box, and being hard to
> configure on top of that.  This is a bug, could you file a bug report
> so that the problem can be looked at?  If people don't report problems
> they experience, then they won't be known.

I'm afraid that the problem was on the third party Elisp package that
provided C# support to CEDET. It required tweaks here and there to make
compile with the CEDET that is distributed with Emacs, lacked detailed
instructions and smelled like unmaintained since a few years ago.

Again, this is not the real issue. The lesson here is that Emacs can
learn a lot from other projects wrt how to behave towards its potential
audience.