Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 7:14 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Emacs for Android by khim
Parent article: Emacs for Android

We got help (but no money, boo) from Google to port Krita to ChromeOS, which also meant a port to Android, since it's the same.

In our experience:

* just the changes from Android version to version need about a full-time developer to track. Especially when it comes to file handling.
* Android users are... They don't consider the limitations of their platform and try to make huge animations on small phones. Additionally, high-school teachers are apparently telling students to install krita on their tablets/chromebooks to fill their class assignments -- which apparently are humongous big animations.
* Android is really good at crashing applications
* The money the port brings in through in-app donations couldn't even be classified as pin money.
* We now have about as many regular Android users as Windows users.

This is not meant as a pro or con Emacs on Android argument, but just my personal experience from the past couple years of maintaining an Android/ChromeOS port of a big free software application.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 8:31 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

So nothing have changes with invention of Android and ChromeOS.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

This was said 35 years ago and apparently is still true today.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 10:43 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

As a Doctor friend said to me, "Doctors are chosen from the general population. Seeing as half the population are below average intelligence, what does that say about doctors?". I guess the same is true for software engineers?

I'm just reeling from a Slack update, where it's blatantly obvious they didn't think through the consequences of their actions ...

Cheers,
Wol

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 17:37 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

Physicians and surgeons are not chosen from the general population at large.

Physicians and surgeons are chosen from the slice of the general population who have achieved the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery – which (among late-GenX-ers like me) is mostly selected from the slice of the general population who could get good A-level results in three STEM subjects (which criterion, whatever people may say about the standard of modern exams then or now, does exclude a very large portion of the general population).

That said, of course, being book smart opens up whole new vistas of folly that people who aren't have no access to.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 20:07 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, it weren't me that said it, it was a doctor friend.

> who could get good A-level results in three STEM subjects

As one of the last baby-boomers, who tried to get into medical school, back then your average trainee doctor was made a UCCA offer of "three passes". (Okay, most of them went on to get one grade higher across all three.) What annoyed me was that, of my friends who got in, only one of them iirc had better grades than me :-) It is what it is. (Gen-X? 20 years younger than me?)

> That said, of course, being book smart opens up whole new vistas of folly that people who aren't have no access to.

More and more as I get older, the importance of experience gets rammed home. You can be the smartest person in the world, and if you haven't met that situation before, you'll make the wrong call ... (As someone "on the spectrum", intuition often beats logic, and we don't have intuition. That said, we do have a sixth sense, which I regularly describe as "hang on, something here doesn't add up".)

Cheers,
Wol

Emacs for Android

Posted Jul 3, 2023 12:39 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Expertise (i.e., knowledge gained from [repeated ideally] experience) can be a siren song. The expert can be over-confident when faced with some new situation, and not recognise when it falls outside their experience (or the experience of those who handed down their expertise to the expert in education). And they can go badly wrong - refusing to cede authority, refusing to acknowledge their lack of expertise, doubling down from one mistake to the next.

Fresh eyes reasoning from first principles may well be better then.

Non-expert intuition can be critical in recognising when experts have gone off their previously beaten tracks, and gotten lost in their own hubris.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 17:16 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (1 responses)

and idiots are especially bad at Emacs

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 20:11 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I seem to remember two interesting facts about education that most bright people fail to grasp ...

As your brain develops, you have to be about 14 before you can really indulge in abstract thought. And maybe half the population never actually reach that milestone.

If you can't think abstract, you're unlikely to make a good programmer, or emacs user :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 13:18 UTC (Fri) by repetitivestrain (guest, #165872) [Link]

AFAIK there has only been one major change to file system handling, in Android 11, with an easy way out provided for programs like Emacs which aren't distributed through the Google Play Store. If you request the permission to ``access all files'', you can access most of the file system through the Unix VFS, the same way you could in earlier versions with the ordinary storage permission.

The same copy of Emacs runs on all versions of Android from 2.2 onwards, so it doesn't seem like it will be an excessive amount of trouble for me to update Emacs to follow the requirements for targeting each new Android release.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jun 30, 2023 22:08 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Unrelated to Emacs-on-Android discussion:

* The money the port brings in through in-app donations couldn't even be classified as pin money.
* We now have about as many regular Android users as Windows users.

And that's precisely why free software is dead on arrival: there is no money in it.

Open Source software have very easy and well-working way out: build your piece of Open Source software as “base platform”. Something free which is not really usable by itself but which can be used by proprietary software competitors to build their products.

Then you can get some money from these proprietary competitors funneled into “base platform”. Just make sure you are not building open core thingie which is actually usable without proprietary parts and you would have enough money to thrive.

Free Software? No answer to this funding question at all. Free software rejects proprietary software which means there are no way to fund it's development.

Emacs for Android

Posted Jul 2, 2023 9:57 UTC (Sun) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Krita is not dead on arrival, it arrived more than a decade ago, and has millions of users. It is very much alive. And we fund over half a dozen developers from income derived from Krita.

It's the Android Play Store that's a bad place to make money.