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>Vim and Emacs are borderline torturous for beginners and it's easy to give up I really do not understand where this belief comes from. I learnt Emacs as a beg

>Vim and Emacs are borderline torturous for beginners and it's easy to give up I really do not understand where this belief comes from. I learnt Emacs as a beginner in the early 2000's when I started university I'd never done any programming before (I'd also never used Unix before) our course was taught on Sun Solaris workstations and emacs I had many frustrations at the time I remember cursing Solaris and the stupid GUI it had (CDE) but never emacs - emacs just worked not sure what is supposed to be torturous about it. Nearly 20 years later I still use Emacs daily it's one of the programs on my computer I probably "couldn't live without". Maybe at this point I'm just a hostage to my tools but i'm too old and too familiar with emacs to bother trying some other editor out - what do people use now sublime text? (if the article is accurate) I've never heard of it before I don't know anyone here at my work who uses it (I am an engineer not a software person though) could be a generational thing I'm in my mid 30's and one of the younger people at my work so maybe all the "cool" Mac kids use it or something...

bitwize 9y ago
There is documentation of secretaries not only learning how to use Multics Emacs in the 1970s -- a much more primitive version than what prevails today -- but also how to extend and customize it using Lisp. (Multics Emacs was the first Lisp-extensible Emacs.) It's not torturous to learn Emacs. But Emacs doesn't work like a standard Windows/Mac app, and today we have fewer professional developers willing to make it past the initial rejection phase of "wellp, this is weird". And yes, today people use Sublime Text, something like Atom, IntelliJ, or -- for hipster cred -- vim. Emacs is apparently retro enough to be a total gonk for new users but advanced enough to not be redeemable for whuffie in hipster circles. Vim closes that gap.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  Got a pointer to the documentation?
  - bitwize 9y ago
    http://multicians.org/mepap.html http://multicians.org/mepap.html This actually appeared on Hackernews a couple of times, which is how I found it. Money quotes: "It was soon found that Emacs could be taught within minutes or an hour to those with no technical experience at all." (referring to TECO Emacs actually but applicable to Multics Emacs) "Non-technical personnel have been observed to acquire enough knowledge of Lisp to extend Emacs for only this purpose." "While ITS TECO code is quite baroque, and accessible to only a few experts, the extension language of Multics Emacs is sufficiently natural and simple to learn that non-technical personnel have successfully written and debugged non-trivial extensions."

bitwize 9y ago

There is documentation of secretaries not only learning how to use Multics Emacs in the 1970s -- a much more primitive version than what prevails today -- but also how to extend and customize it using Lisp. (Multics Emacs was the first Lisp-extensible Emacs.) It's not torturous to learn Emacs. But Emacs doesn't work like a standard Windows/Mac app, and today we have fewer professional developers willing to make it past the initial rejection phase of "wellp, this is weird". And yes, today people use Sublime Text, something like Atom, IntelliJ, or -- for hipster cred -- vim. Emacs is apparently retro enough to be a total gonk for new users but advanced enough to not be redeemable for whuffie in hipster circles. Vim closes that gap.

AlexCoventry 9y ago
Got a pointer to the documentation?
- bitwize 9y ago
  http://multicians.org/mepap.html http://multicians.org/mepap.html This actually appeared on Hackernews a couple of times, which is how I found it. Money quotes: "It was soon found that Emacs could be taught within minutes or an hour to those with no technical experience at all." (referring to TECO Emacs actually but applicable to Multics Emacs) "Non-technical personnel have been observed to acquire enough knowledge of Lisp to extend Emacs for only this purpose." "While ITS TECO code is quite baroque, and accessible to only a few experts, the extension language of Multics Emacs is sufficiently natural and simple to learn that non-technical personnel have successfully written and debugged non-trivial extensions."