I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant [LWN.net]

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 8:51 UTC (Thu) by mmarkov (subscriber, #4978)
Parent article: Emacs chooses Bazaar

And to a large extent that is due to Stallman. Or it seems so to me.

First of all, the split between emacs and xemacs happened because Stallman was adamant about
some minute issues with what was going to become xemacs and chose to disregard the technical
advantages it had over gnu emacs. A merger between them was possible back then and it did not
take place because of RMS. And that is the official explanation. It seems to me that in fact
Stallman is adamantly against anything he cannot control and his group did not conceive (the
anti-git attitude described in the article seems to be another example for that).

The split between emacs and xemacs was a Very Bad Thing (tm) because it takes a lot of effort
to evolve such a big project, keeping it both up to date and bug free. The manpower behind
both those projects is clearly insufficient (which is quite obvious considering the release
cycles) and keeping them separate is detrimental to both of them. BTW, I used to follow
xemacs's newsgroup and I have seen its developers saying precisely the same - the split is
bad.

It seems that xemacs's development has practically stopped. OK, so emacs won much to
Stallman's satisfaction. Good. I switched to emacs in order to use features like anti-aliased
fonts that are unavailable in xemacs. But even the most advanced emacs, custom compiled from
csv several months ago, has issues with TT fonts and anti-aliasing for non-Latin alphabet
languages. All the other editors on my Fedora 7 system deal perfectly fine with UTF-8 and
cyrillic characters, just the mighty emacs fails there.

And so it seems to me that even emacs's development is going to follow the development of
xemacs. And emacs is going to become more and more irrelevant to the young generation of
potential users. I mean that not because emacs fails me in particular, but - come on - in 2008
an editor has to deal with Unicode Just Fine (tm).

It's a good thing that we have Linus as a project leader for the kernel! With someone like
Stallman in control Linux would be doomed.

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I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 11:40 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Among the major challengers to emacs is the immersive IDE:
Tim Bray:
>The feature that tempted me away from Emacs is the Navigator; you just hover over this little
button and this thing pops up... a really nice way to navigate around a big honkin’ C file.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/11/NB6-1-C

However, if you've hung out in #emacs on freenode, or looked at www.emacswiki.org, you
probably guess that emacs will continue to improve things like the Emacs Code Browser to stay
competitive.
Now and then, working without an X session seems a release...

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 14:03 UTC (Thu) by wlach (subscriber, #23397) [Link]

Speaking of, does anyone know why GNU Emacs seems to have won out over XEmacs? If you'd asked
me a few years ago, I would have thought that the latter's more open development model would
have pushed it ahead. I'm surprised to see most of the exciting feature development work
(Unicode, Xft fonts) going into the GNU version.

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 22:10 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It died largely because it had, oh, one really active developer at any 
given time, and right now it has none (Ben Wing being too busy).

It's reanimatable, of course: it's free software...

xemacs liveness

Posted Mar 17, 2008 12:10 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

While not an xemacs user (maybe I should become one just to be contrary :-), this thread prompted me to visit its site out of curiousity. Doesn't look so dead to me, eg. there is more traffic in mailing lists than in many other FOSS projects (eg see http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2008-March/thread.html). The latest stable release is 1/2 years old, which also is not so unusual.

xemacs liveness

Posted Mar 17, 2008 20:16 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The pace of development at the moment is very, very slow. The unstable 
release is moving at the speed of most projects' stable releases, because 
nobody working on it has the time to do major development. (I include 
myself in this to some extent. I don't have hg commit privs largely 
because I, sigh, wouldn't have the time to do anything with them. I need 
some way to double the number of hours in the day, or perhaps triple 
them...)

But it works, and is revivable if someone steps up to the plate *looks at 
self guiltily*

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 22:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

btw, XEmacs 21.5.28 has support for both Unicode and Xft fonts (not 
flawless, but working well enough to use).

I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 21:51 UTC (Thu) by skissane (guest, #38675) [Link]

Stallman has his flaws, as do all of us, but I think you are being excessively harsh on him. I think there were multiple reasons for the GNU/XEmacs fork. Factors included technical disagreements, disagreements over project management style, and disagreements over legal issues (i.e. GNU wanted copyright assignment to the FSF, something which several XEmacs developers were unwilling or unable to do.) I think the first two could be sorted out over time (look at the history of GCC/EGCS), but it is the legal disagreements which have served to make the divorce permanent. As I understand, Stallman has previously received legal advice that the FSF's ability to enforce the GPL on GNU packages is enhanced by having the copyright wholly owned by one entity. Whether this is good advice or not (I suspect that as the courts get more exposure to the GPL it may be less of an concern), you can understand Stallman's point of view.

I think in the end the reason why GNU Emacs seems to have mostly won out has been more critical mass. XEmacs certainly pioneered a number of interesting features, and even if (due to legal concerns) its code has not been incorporated into GNU Emacs, certainly the design & implementation experience of the XEmacs project has been beneficial to GNU Emacs over time. And forks in open source projects are not a purely negative thing — sometimes it is useful to be able to try competing approaches to the same problem.

And I don't think which choice of revision control system the GNU project makes is really a big issue. Its not a case of making a technically inferior due to political concerns. When faced with a choice between several technically excellent products, its often a good idea to turn to non-technical considerations to make a decision, because if you insist on deciding purely on technical merits, you run the risk of turning into Buridan's ass.