emacs designers neglect slower computer users?

[Dan Jacobson]

It has occurred to me that some parts of emacs are unreasonably slow,
and that if at GNU Laboratories they used as slow a computer as I do,
they would soon notice and optimize those areas.

On the other hand, asking the GNU engineers to use slow computers
might stymie their creativity, making them think 1980's thoughts
instead of 2010's dreams.

On the third hand most of the world's population wouldn't necessarily
have fast computers if any at all.  So if one wants to be in tune with
the third world, one needs to slow down, whereupon the non optimized
parts become noticeable.

I say it might be a good exercise to use a P166 processor with 32K
memory like me just to find those slow spots.

> What spots are those?  Your message is unclear.  I need more
> information before I can find those spots.*

Just try it with the slow machine.  Force yourself for a couple hours.
You'll be bound to find them.  You don't even have to have all the
bells and whistles turned on like I probably do in my .emacs [linked
from my software.html page]

Anyway, see what happens when you win all those prize and award money,
and even certainly some neat hardware donations?  It was all a plot to
get you computing too fast --- too fast for the future developing
world markets.

Anyways,
$ top
Mem:    31332K av,   30000K used,    1332K free,       0K shrd,     500K buff
Swap:  255488K av,   55332K used,  200156K free                    8180K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 2864 jidanni    0   0 21168  14M  2676 S     0.0 47.9  31:25 emacs
  584 root       7   0 13064 3080  1056 S     2.6  9.8  15:35 X
 1994 jidanni    0   0 11448 1656  1236 S     0.0  5.2   2:59 netscape-commun

Oh, I remember, "eight megs and constantly swapping", e.m.a.c.s

*RMS will probably say this.
-- 
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