Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 17, 2019, at 11:26, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> 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*.

There is another word for that (and the earlier wheel metaphor may have escaped 
you), it is call "standardization".

> 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.

Please. Text editing is the most common task by at least an order of magnitude 
in the IT world. Even for kids.

> Maybe Emacs requires a bit more effort at the beginning, but it pays off... 
> at least on text manipulation tasks.

Except that no. Check Eli's list of areas where emacs has fallen way behind. 
There are all related to advanced text manipulation.

> 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.

Because they don't fit your narrative ? I've started trying emacs in the mid 
90's and the best pro editor I could find then that I could make sense of was 
BBEdit. I'm still using it when I have no time to uncover emacs' arbitrary 
idiosyncrasies. In fact, this discussion makes me realize that the only reason 
I use emacs is because it is a lisp environment and so I don't have to wait for 
developers to develop something for me and I can write a few lines of lisp 
myself if needed. Just like I write a few lines of AppleScript to solve trivial 
issues on my Mac instead of buying a $5 hack (but I could write AppleScript to 
automate BBEdit, except that it is less elegant than lisp).

>> 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.

Ummm. So you agree that emacs sucks until you reach a given yet undefined 
enlightenment point and that free software is not a factor, so why not plainly 
declare that emacs is for a self proclaimed elite and then move on?

> OTOH, we have the vim phenomenon. An "old thing" which is way more
> peculiar than Emacs,

No. Unless "peculiar" means "consistent".

> 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.

"consistency"

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

If that's your conclusion, you must have missed a few mails in the thread. Eli 
clarified that a long time ago.

Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune