Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Karl Fogel]

On 12 May 2020, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote:
>ndame writes:
>
>> There is a discussion on Reddit about sponsoring development of
>> multithreading in Emacs, and people there say it's too hard, takes a
>> lot of time and it doesn't even bring that much benefit to the user.
>>
>> If this is the case (is it?) then what are those other features which
>> could bring much more tangible benefits for the user and assuming
>> somebody works on them full time sponsored by the community they can
>> be implemented in, say, a few months?
>
>I guess there are really two potential directions to think about it:
>
> - What is the most potentially useful direction for newcomers who are
>   familiar with other mainstream UI patterns?
> - What is the most potentially useful project for existing everyday
>   emacs users?
>
>I think these are two separate things to solve.  IMO the former is more
>important than the latter right now because Emacs has a way of making
>users capable of extending it... it is one of the most beautiful things
>about the choice of lisp as its configuration system.
>
>So the real question to me would be: how do we lower the barrier to
>entry?  [...]
>
>Thus if there's a space for paid work, I think it would be to do this
>work which might not be as directly useful to the developer, but would
>be directly useful to other newcomers.  It would be useful and important
>IMO to directly test against newcomers' experiences and collect feedback.

FWIW -- and perhaps to your surprise -- I would argue that this is *not* the 
important question for Emacs.

I've explained why in another thread:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-05/msg01855.html

  From: Karl Fogel <address@hidden>
  To: Emacs Devel
  Subject: Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre
  Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 11:18:50 -0500
  Message-ID: <address@hidden>

Best regards,
-Karl