Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[T.V Raman]

Karl Fogel <address@hidden> writes:

well said!> On 12 May 2020, excalamus--- via "Emacs development discussions." 
wrote:
>>May 11, 2020, 23:12 by address@hidden:
>>What are we competing for?  I feel that while other threads are
>>examining "missing features", it would be helpful to examine what GNU
>>Emacs does offer.  Not only in software features, but maybe also in
>>philosophy, community, or tradition.
>>
>>What is it about GNU Emacs that makes this mailing list bustle with
>>enthusiasm?  Other editors use GPL, provide source code, have
>>documentation, are customizable, and extendable.  There's something
>>in how GNU Emacs implements these that is different.  I feel like
>>there are taters to find if we dig a little.
>>
>>Is it because Emacs Lisp is unique to Emacs that Emacs teaches as
>>well as documents?
>>Is it that by being a pseudo-Lisp machine, Emacs puts users in the
>>zone of proximal development?
>>Is GNU Emacs the best embodiment of the GNU philosophy? 
>
> Sure, I'll take the bait:
>
> To the best of my knowledge, no other editing environment rewards sustained 
> user investment so well.
>
> With Emacs, if you keep investing -- i.e., acquiring knowledge and
> skill by reading documentation, writing customizations, and exploring
> others' customizations -- Emacs keeps rewarding you with a better and
> better editing experience.  The degree to which it does this seems
> normal to many of us here, because we've been used to it for many
> years.  I think we sometimes fail to appreciate the degree to which
> non-users, potential ("Emacs-curious") users, and even many actual new
> users are *not* aware of it: they don't realize how enormous the
> reward can be, and how broad its scope.
>
> This should probably affect how we think about promoting Emacs.  Emacs
> shouldn't necessarily try to attract everyone who needs to edit text
> [1].  Many people who edit text nonetheless don't view text editing as
> a primary activity worthy of investment.  Those users are not good
> candidates for Emacs.
>
> Emacs's best prospects are with the sorts of people who *do* see -- or
> who can be persuaded to see -- text editing as worthy of investment.
> There's a loose correlation in which good programmers tend to be those
> sorts of people, because good programmers are usually willing to
> invest in learning their tools in general.  E.g., they'll learn their
> text editor the same way they'll learn their debugger, their
> programming framework, etc.  But the set isn't limited to just
> programmers.  For example, scientists and other academics who edit
> LaTeX documents are often good candidates for Emacs usage, because by
> both temperament and life situation they are well-positioned to
> understand how sustained investment in learning their editing
> environment could pay off in the long term.
>
> So I suggest that GNU Emacs's raison d'être is to be the text editor that 
> best rewards sustained user investment.
>
> I think Emacs actually does so right now, too, and that we just haven't 
> always communicated this fact clearly enough.
>
> Thus, instead of focusing on making Emacs easier for new users, it
> would be better to focus on smoothing out discontinuities in Emacs'
> investment-reward curve.  The long-term health of Emacs as a project
> will not come from a large number of lightly committed users who don't
> appreciate what makes Emacs unique, but rather from a smaller number
> of users for whom Emacs is important and irreplaceable.
>
> I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't improve the new-user experience
> in Emacs, of course.  We should make it as easy as possible for
> newcomers *while still prioritizing invested users*.  In user
> experience design, there are frequently tradeoffs between making
> things easy for newcomers and making them rewarding for experts.
> Unfortunately, too often in design discussions, the new user
> experience automatically wins out -- it's like some kind of magic card
> that people play (even sometimes unconsciously) in UI/UX discussions.
> For Emacs, this would be a mistake.  Emacs's great strength will never
> be in its new-user experience, and this is in some ways a necessary
> consequence of Emacs being so great for highly invested long-term
> users.
>
> This also suggests that the sorts of features that highly-invested
> users tend to want -- for example, LSP-based features -- should be
> more important to us than how square the menus are or what menu items
> are shown in a default startup configuration.  When we make decisions
> that disappoint the core user base, we endanger the project much more
> than when we make decisions that disappoint users (or potential users)
> who weren't likely to become highly invested anyway.
>
> (The fact that Emacs promotes free software by being a good GPL'd
> program is nice too, and is important to many of us, but it's not
> unique to Emacs.)
>
> Best regards,
> -Karl
>

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