Re: Emacs learning curve

[Stefan Monnier]

> By keeping Emacs decidely different from other, more popular UIs
> you keep most of new users out and consequently competent
> contributors as well.

While this may very well be true, I think this is unavoidable.
Changing the UI of Emacs is very difficult, because this UI has been
with us for 25 years and is embedded in pretty much every package out
there (bundled and not bundled), so changing it without making Emacs
even more of an inconsistent mess than it already is (and hence without
alienating all its current users) is nigh on impossible.

I would welcome attempts to do it, of course.  But I won't hold
my breath.  BTW, while as a user you may notice those UI problems quite
easily, as a developer you'd notice plenty of comparable problems in
Elisp's design, and for very similar reasons they can't get fixed.

IOW fixing Emacs requires rewriting it from scratch, throwing away
backward compatibility.


        Stefan