Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Emanuel Berg]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> 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 probably outdated, but you get the idea).

I forgot! The *PlayStation* had a demo CD, with lots of
worthless demos for games, but it also had a BASIC
editor. I remember you could plug in an ordinary
keyboard, write code, and then save it on one of those
memory cards!

As a kid, there were just so many things to program and
the thought never stroke me that once I would use *one*
application for everything, and that the interface would
be the same, and configurable... Actually, that whole
concept was so far beyond me, I couldn't have verbalized
it by a longshot. I just never thought about such
things...

I wonder if people that *still* write code all over the
place, are they aware that they are at a severe
deficiency? No common cursor movements,
search-and-replace, no setting up all the keys, learning
everything anew every time they switch IDE, etc.?

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