Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 2:35 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

Meanwhile, GitHub has replaced Emacs and all other locally installed editors with a cloud based IDE:

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2020/05/06/github-codespace-let...

It seems pointless to try to make Emacs popular in a world where proprietary software running in web browsers has replaced locally installed software. Even if Emacs were ported to WebAssembly or asm.js, who is going to run it in their browser instead of the default GitHub IDE and how are they going to convince GitHub host Emacs on their servers?

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 4:56 UTC (Thu) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link] (4 responses)

There are Web-based clients for everything these days. It still hasn't killed off desktop software entirely. One reason is, of course, extensibility. Back when Emacs was remotely relevant, that was one of its big draws, of course.

It's absolutely natural that the most popular IDE is essentially a reimagination of Emacs for the 21st century. It's ironic of course that it's a Microsoft product, but it demonstrates that Microsoft are far bolder and more willing to experiment (by creating, and giving away, a free competitor to their own IDE, which was a former market leader) than the infamously hidebound Emacs development community.

The comments here are little better than in the mailing list thread, and for the same reason. I'm pushing 40 (and yet I'm a "millenial" as much as the term ever had a specific meaning) and I've been happily using Atom (another Electron-based, Javascript-extensible free software IDE) for years. VSCode appears to have all the momentum, so I'm preparing to switch to it. That's going to require a bit of retraining, but nothing that goes beyond the inevitable requirement to continually learn and re-learn technology that comes with working in this industry. And I am _well_ below the median age for an LWN commenter, let alone an Emacs user. It's gotten to the point where the proud greybeards are literally all reaching retirement age, and most of them have stubbornly resisted making any alterations to their lifestyle or world view since the dotcom boom. Hell, the infamous Lucid Emacs schism was nearly thirty years ago now, and on the Emacs side it's still _exactly the same people_ acting in exactly the same manner. There will only be another couple of rounds of this masturbation disguised as retrospection before there is nobody left in this group to carry the fight forward.

As a final footnote, it's remarkable that seemingly nobody has pointed out that it is far easier to add Emacs-like features to a modern editor than it is to drag Emacs out of the 70s. This is practically the first thing that gets written for any new editor. And yet the other camp has been bloviating for decades about the philosophical utility of having working scrollbars.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 9:51 UTC (Thu) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link]

When I read your part about the "the proud greybeards" I was reminded of the so called Planck's principle: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

IT shows similar patterns: COBOL, Fortran and Emacs don't get replaced once something better appears, but when an older generation retires and the infrastructure and tools they built up get (very slowly) replaced with the stuff the next generation grew up with. Usually, the time to learn and the mental change needed to move from what we got comfortable with to something different is just too high unless a new project or position forces us to into such a change. This resistance to change is also one of the main reasons for the never ending language wars and debates about init systems.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 11:35 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's absolutely natural that the most popular IDE is essentially a reimagination of Emacs for the 21st century. It's ironic of course that it's a Microsoft product, but it demonstrates that Microsoft are far bolder and more willing to experiment (by creating, and giving away, a free competitor to their own IDE, which was a former market leader) than the infamously hidebound Emacs development community.

You entirely missed one crucial difference:

Microsoft has a legion of programmers they can (and do) order to work on things, and the budget to make that happen, as well as an enormous captive developer audience due to platform lock-in. Not to mention a couple of decades of questionably-legal shenanigans.

Emacs has never had any of that.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 12:30 UTC (Thu) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not convinced by your argument. Your observation

while completely true could be stated exactly the same for the comparison for Linux and Windows. But there the outcome is rather different than what we observe in Emacs vs. VSC. So you can't only focus on Microsoft, you also have to take a look at the development community of Emacs.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 13:06 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> while completely true could be stated exactly the same for the comparison for Linux and Windows.

So, how has "Linux" used its desktop-monopoly-funded profits to enter new markets with loss-leaders, many times over?

Microsoft has probably spent more money on payroll for VS Code in the past year alone than emacs has seen in the form of paid contributions over its entire lifespan, and the pocket change of VS Code's marketing budget likely exceeds the FSF's annual operating costs.

> So you can't only focus on Microsoft, you also have to take a look at the development community of Emacs.

Of course! But let's not pretend that the structure of a well-funded top-down commercial project's community (or the goals that foster that community) will be similar to the community that comes out of a volunteer-driven charity.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 14:33 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

In other words, you can't compete with services by writing software.

(What's the quip? Freedom of the press only applies to those who own presses?)