Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@gmail.com> writes:

>> On May 17, 2019, at 5:50, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
>> 
>>> so we need to offer some advantage on the first
>>> try over the others to keep the users.
>> 
>> Emacs provides some advantages, but they are not apparent until you
>> experience them. That's a problem for people grown on a culture of
>> instant gratification. Emacs appeals to certain type of users who
>> understand that gains require efforts.
>
> I find that comment extremely condescending.
>
> If "instant gratification" means finding a common ground on which one
> can get started right away, then I'm all for it.

"Instant gratification" means wanting things that require no learning
nor practicing nor understanding to be effectively used *right* *now*.

It would be doubleplusgood if Emacs could be one of those things but,
alas, it is obvious that text editors still are on the class of things
that require certain effort to be used effectively. Maybe Emacs requires
a bit more effort at the beginning, but it pays off... at least on text
manipulation tasks.

> Considering the state of affairs, emacs seems first to appeal to
> people who want to give priority to free software, at the *cost* of
> ease of use.

>From 1985 to 2010 (give or take a few years and discounting Java and
some other modern language) Emacs was the best programmer's editor on
the "by hackers, for hackers" category. I suppose that most current
users come from that period.

> Access to free software should never be the sole privilege of "users
> who understand that gains require efforts". Quite the opposite.

Free Software is not a factor *today*, because most competitors are Free
Software too. Even Visual Studio Code is MIT-licensed.

OTOH, we have the vim phenomenon. An "old thing" which is way more
peculiar than Emacs, but with a growing user base. Those who point out
the dificulties of new users to copy and paste or to save text to a file
with Emacs, should ponder how vim has no problem requiring training for
doing the most basic thing a text editor is supposed to do.

Maybe, just maybe, having "kill & yank" instead "copy & paste" is not
the cause of Emacs' lack of appeal to the new generations.