Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Eric S. Raymond]

Miles Bader <address@hidden>:
> "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
> > They're not fashionistas. They have a belief, which is not badly founded
> > given the evidence available to them, that the Emacs project is old,
> > tired, badly run, and effectively moribund.
> 
> Are they judging the software, or the "project"?

Fair question.  I caught a little of both.  I'm not sure they're
clearly distinguished in the critics' thinking.

David Matuszek (star CS professor at UPenn) has been griping at me
for years about things like features he relied upon disappearing
during version upgrades.  He's made it very clear that he thinks this
sort of thing is a symptom of inattention to what users are actually
doing with the software by developers too obsessed with the next cool
hack.  I think that counts as both software and project croticism.

Cyndy (AI researcher, Dave's daughter, formerly with Doug Lenat's Cyc
project and now doing a six-year gig in Seattle) didn't particularly
slam the software, but was entertainingly rude about CVS.  One of her
milder remarks was to the effect that "Somebody needs to remind RMS
what year it is."  There wasn't much I could say about this project
criticism given that I pretty completely agree with it.

Matt, whose last name I didn't catch but who I think is a software
designer at Google, came the closest to having a "fashionista"
position; he thinks Eclipse's UI makes Emacs's look paleolithic.

There was someone else in the discussion who's a doctoral candidate at CMU
doing research in language design -- I don't remember what her gripe
was but she sure wasn't giving Emacs any love.

It was rather unnerving.
 
> [Note that I'm all for moving to more modern tools.  Subversion is
> probably not a great choice though -- if we're going to change, we
> should change to one of the distributed systems like git.]

Agreed, one of the 3Gs would be better.  I'm doing a technical survey paper
on them now; I'll be *extremely* well equipped to choose one well-fitted
for the Emacs project's needs when that's done.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>