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After poking around his site, I laughed a little after he described Emacs as a "stripped down, no frills text editor". http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2005/09/05/

by brewski 16y ago

After poking around his site, I laughed a little after he described Emacs as a "stripped down, no frills text editor". http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2005/09/05/better-developer-dont-use-a-dull-knife/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2005/09/05/better-developer-don...

SwellJoe 16y ago
If I didn't know better I'd think he was trolling. He goes on to compare emacs to COBOL. I don't even like emacs (I use vim, of course), but it shows an unbelievable level of ignorance of the current state of emacs to act as though it's "ancient" and clearly inferior to the Visual Studio editor.
- jff 16y ago
  It's pretty ancient. It's older than vi, and vi is from the 70s. Yes, there's been some development, but using Emacs on TOPS-10 or ITS is an awful lot like using it under Linux in 2010.
  - SwellJoe 16y ago
    "Yes, there's been some development, but using Emacs on TOPS-10 or ITS is an awful lot like using it under Linux in 2010." That's a huge stretch, and kinda like saying that using Linux is an awful lot like using SunOS 1.0. Sure, the basics of use are the same, and someone who used an ancient emacs version could pickup using a modern version reasonably easily, but syntax highlighting, auto-completion, X and GUI support, windowing, multi-file editing, etc. have been added over the years (and that's just stuff I know of, off the top of my head, and I don't even use emacs). The emacs distribution has grown by several orders of magnitude in size since those TOPS-10 and ITS implementations. My point is that Emacs is every bit the editor that Visual Studio editor is, and contains pretty much all the same features, and a lot that Visual Studio will never have. And, more importantly, the most productive developers I've ever known used either emacs or vim...I can't think of a single great developer that uses Visual Studio (I'm sure they exist, but I've yet to meet one). It's just idiotic to claim that emacs is an ineffective tool when the evidence is so strong that it is extremely effective for millions of developers.
    - jff 16y ago
      Well sure, it's definitely a fantastic development environment. I loved Emacs well enough at one point, although eventually my hand started to ache from constant M-x'ing and buffer switching and I gave it up. I'm just pointing out that Emacs is quite old, and that someone used to the 40-year-old version wouldn't really have much trouble using the most recent version, at least for the basics.
- deleted 16y ago
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by brewski 16y ago

SwellJoe 16y ago

If I didn't know better I'd think he was trolling. He goes on to compare emacs to COBOL. I don't even like emacs (I use vim, of course), but it shows an unbelievable level of ignorance of the current state of emacs to act as though it's "ancient" and clearly inferior to the Visual Studio editor.

jff 16y ago
It's pretty ancient. It's older than vi, and vi is from the 70s. Yes, there's been some development, but using Emacs on TOPS-10 or ITS is an awful lot like using it under Linux in 2010.
- SwellJoe 16y ago
  "Yes, there's been some development, but using Emacs on TOPS-10 or ITS is an awful lot like using it under Linux in 2010." That's a huge stretch, and kinda like saying that using Linux is an awful lot like using SunOS 1.0. Sure, the basics of use are the same, and someone who used an ancient emacs version could pickup using a modern version reasonably easily, but syntax highlighting, auto-completion, X and GUI support, windowing, multi-file editing, etc. have been added over the years (and that's just stuff I know of, off the top of my head, and I don't even use emacs). The emacs distribution has grown by several orders of magnitude in size since those TOPS-10 and ITS implementations. My point is that Emacs is every bit the editor that Visual Studio editor is, and contains pretty much all the same features, and a lot that Visual Studio will never have. And, more importantly, the most productive developers I've ever known used either emacs or vim...I can't think of a single great developer that uses Visual Studio (I'm sure they exist, but I've yet to meet one). It's just idiotic to claim that emacs is an ineffective tool when the evidence is so strong that it is extremely effective for millions of developers.
  - jff 16y ago
    Well sure, it's definitely a fantastic development environment. I loved Emacs well enough at one point, although eventually my hand started to ache from constant M-x'ing and buffer switching and I gave it up. I'm just pointing out that Emacs is quite old, and that someone used to the 40-year-old version wouldn't really have much trouble using the most recent version, at least for the basics.
deleted 16y ago
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