Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[tomas]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:28:00AM +0900, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

Condescending seems to go both ways, mind you.

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

Fully agreed here.

> > The really big problem is that Emacs no longer compete on areas were it 
> > used to bring the largest gains. Other editors largely surpassed Emacs' 
> > gains while requiring less effort.
> 
> Eli earlier clearly identified a number of areas where emacs required huge 
> and totally undue efforts to get the thing to work as expected in the 21st 
> century. 

Yes, and to achieve that, we gotta work together. It doesn't help
to insinuate intentions as you did above ;-)

Point is -- perhaps there's a tradeoff between initial ease-of-use
efficient for experienced users and the way from "here" to "there"?

Perhaps it takes more effort to come up with a software which is
good at all three departments?

I'm convinced that conventional software has promoted patterns which
tend to keep users in dependency (much more so in the Web "application"
space[1], because there it's strategic for your business), and that
those patterns infiltrate our way of seeing things -- therefore they
end up in free software too, for no reason.

Cheers

[1] Actually, those have names, like, e.g. Dark Patterns
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

-- tomás

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