Re: Emacs learning curve

[David Kastrup]

<address@hidden> writes:

> I disagree that Emacs is actively trying to work against certain classes
> of users, as you seem to suggest.
>
> Obviously, Emacs has varying degrees of support for different
> programming languages. Somebody has to provide such support, it does not
> materialise out of the blue, and as with most free software support
> follows the interest of the developers.
>
> If C# is poorly supported, it simply means that very few dedicated emacs
> hackers has had the need/motivation/time to provide it. In contrast,
> Emacs offers some of the best Common Lisp support anywhere, complete
> with cross-referencing, documentation access, completion and minibuffer
> argument hints.

The question is why the respective facilities are not part of the
generic Emacs language support framework.  Support for every language
has a completely disjoint set of features, keybindings, highlighting,
and so on of wildly differing quality, design and usability.

One problem with learning Emacs is that you have to learn it new for
each language, and every person writing language support has to create
it new from almost scratch.

If there is a new language, and two different people write non-trivial
support for it, the results will be wildly different.

-- 
David Kastrup