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Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?


From: Emanuel Berg
Subject: Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 01:54:31 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux)

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks for that picture.  It confirms my personal
> hunchy feel that 20 years ago emacs-vi were kind of
> neck to neck; whereas today emacs is increasingly in
> the category: "Whazzat??" for young programmers.

I don't know how young "young programmers" are. Lots of
guys start at 12 and they don't know what an editor or
an IDE is, they just code whatever they have, be it
Visual Basic 5.0 (because that's installed on their
parent's PC), HyperCard (ditto Mac), or the BASIC for
their TI-83 calculator (actually, those examples are
probably outdated, but you get the idea).

Those kids can code pretty advanced stuff reading
tutorials on the web, and those "Learn X in zero
time"-books. But all the terminology ("recursion",
"nested", etc. etc.), as well as all the Unix stuff
(aliases, the shell, etc. etc.) are typically lost for
those kids. But it's no big deal because they can pick
that up much faster than a general scientist, who cannot
write code, will pick up programming (which might even
be impossible). A lot of math people are worthless
programmers, for example, because the reason in terms of
"pure", "clean", etc., which isn't what programming is
about.

But I digress... what I wanted to tell you is: when I
started study CS, we all got a book on Unix. It was
written by students, which was noticeable, and a lot of
the details I didn't like. But I read it two times, so I
guess I liked it, on second thoughts. In that book,
there were *two* ambitious chapters on Emacs. There
weren't much Elisp but general usage was covered
well. Vim wasn't mentioned. I'm not making a point, I'm
just saying it, because that was the case.

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573


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