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Yes, Emacs is useful. Yes, it can be used for great things. Am I smart enough to know how to fix it? No. Do I have any solutions to the problems I perceive? No.

Yes, Emacs is useful. Yes, it can be used for great things. Am I smart enough to know how to fix it? No. Do I have any solutions to the problems I perceive? No. But, that DOES not mean that they do not exist. We're riding the back of Moore's law and we can't even take advantage of it. Think about it this way: take something you like, or think is well designed, and imagine it 10 years in the future. Now 20. Then 30. And so on. When does it start being a piece of shit? Because, you see, everything besides art and the most practical devices turn to shit eventually. It's happening to emacs, and a lot of other software, and no one wants to admit to it. You're right, algorithms are timeless. But, you are an absolute idiot if you think that the tools we use don't influence how we conceptualize things. If you use C, it's almost impossible to think in a pointer-free manner (I mean stacks, not gc). Or that the tools we use influence who tries it. Most people have a horrid view of cs, and for good reason. The tools we use represent cs, and they do so poorly. Very, very poorly. The point isn't emacs. Or quicklisp. It's that people become too satisfied with the status quo. They are happy to master what exists, and pride themselves in that. And they should, we need that. But, we also need anarchy. We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. I want to make this clear: I am an absolute idiot on this forum compared to most of you guys. But, that doesn't mean I can't be on the right side of fate, or understand that. You're right, no one is forcing me to use emacs. Or gdb. Or Windows. Or C++. Or internet explorer. But guess what, they all get pushed by the popular kids.

kamaal 15y ago
>>We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. This is right, but something like Emacs isn't a joke to invent, maintain and grow. Look of it something like, Emacs is a tool designed to work hundreds and thousands line of code. And that's only a beginning. You need to make all that text context sensitive to each other. You need features to make enable heavy text lifting, automating complex text editing, and then enabling them all through macros. And not just that, you need features to run a shell inside the editor. You need to enable code-checkin features. May be to do to a quick check you need to read some news or read email. You need enable code profiling, features to enable seamless debugging. You also need to manage to-do lists. As you will see the list is only growing. And again, you need to make all that programmer friendly, you need to enable to do all that through just keyboard because tend to be in efficient source of input for that kind of editing. How many tools since the advent of programming have been to do all that? And still be maintainable, relevant and usable for so long as Emacs and vim? I hope it was as easy to build a editor that would make coding all milk and honey. But with generations of programmers and their combined effort is what Emacs and Vi is all about.

kamaal 15y ago

>>We need people to invent things. We need new things. Change is good, it's inevitable. This is right, but something like Emacs isn't a joke to invent, maintain and grow. Look of it something like, Emacs is a tool designed to work hundreds and thousands line of code. And that's only a beginning. You need to make all that text context sensitive to each other. You need features to make enable heavy text lifting, automating complex text editing, and then enabling them all through macros. And not just that, you need features to run a shell inside the editor. You need to enable code-checkin features. May be to do to a quick check you need to read some news or read email. You need enable code profiling, features to enable seamless debugging. You also need to manage to-do lists. As you will see the list is only growing. And again, you need to make all that programmer friendly, you need to enable to do all that through just keyboard because tend to be in efficient source of input for that kind of editing. How many tools since the advent of programming have been to do all that? And still be maintainable, relevant and usable for so long as Emacs and vim? I hope it was as easy to build a editor that would make coding all milk and honey. But with generations of programmers and their combined effort is what Emacs and Vi is all about.