Re: Issues with emacs

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

"Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com> writes:

>> From: notbob
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 2:28 PM
>> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> Subject: Re: Issues with emacs
>> 
>> I realize emacs would be much more useful if I was a programmer,
>> particularly a lisp programmer, but I'm not.  
>
> This summarizes the split among the Emacs user community that I see in
> this discussion thread.  Those of us who are programmer types are
> probably a lot happier with Emacs as it is (and as it has been since
> its start many decades ago) than those who aren't programmer types.
> Partly it's mindset, but also gets to depth of knowledge about how to
> use the tool -- and how to change what it does/how it works.
>
> Regarding bloat, an analogy: if all you ever need is one specific
> knife blade, a Swiss Army Knife will seem to have a lot of bloat.

This hasn't to be.  As RMS shown us, even secretaries can like emacs, if
we just NOT tell them they have to program it: just tell them about
"configuring" it.  Don't ever mention the words "program",
"programming", etc.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

    It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (5). He wrote a
    version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in
    MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written
    entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success —
    programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the
    secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used
    a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but
    didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed
    they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the
    manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to
    program.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.