Re: Changes for emacs 28

[Ergus]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 06:05:33PM +0300, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:
> On 2020-09-13 15:53 +03, Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> wrote:
> > Why the vanilla emacs users almost hasn't increased or has decreases if
> > the number of programmers has exponentially grow in the world?  And
> > being emacs so powerful and old; how is it possible that it is
> > frequently not even listed in the GNU/Linux popular editors articles or
> > it is back in the list?  The emacs popularity is so low these days (even
> > in GNU/Linux users) that some distros still comes with emacs 24. And if
> > we split spacemacs and doom apart it is almost negligible... we are even
> > after vim.
>
> Those distros are part of the Emacs community.  And IMHO a very good
> part.  With them, a very diverse set of users find ways to make use of
> Emacs.
Agree. But many times they need to reinvent the wheel and duplicate
efforts to add things unavailable and claimed in vanilla (there are many
examples of unneeded duplication in melpa with almost no differences
between them.)


> > How the emacs modifications (specially spacemacs) have found a set of
> > frequent developers, and a big younger community? (which is not bigger
> > because it is a bit overloaded of external packages IMO)
>
> Because they are producing great software that helps people in ways
> Emacs core may not.
Sometimes maybe, but in general... Why emacs may not?

> > How is it possible that all those dummy and young editors have multiple
> > times more users and community than Emacs when they don't really bring
> > anything much better than us?
>
> That’s insulting to the users and developers of those editors, which
> are, again, great software.
Sorry, I should have added: compared to emacs ;p

> > I think that when emacs was created it was a revolutionary thing; it
> > brought an "easier" way to do "complex" things in that time's standard
> > and broke many paradigms. Why now we constantly insist in "paradigm of
> > computing" and "historic reasons" or "because in the 90's ..."? I am a
> > big supporter of backward compatibility, but sometimes the problem
> > becomes "evolve or die".
>
> You’re over-dramatising it.  Emacs was a nice idea that built upon the
> paradigm of software it was created in.  Lisp machines, screen editors
> becoming a thing after the introduction of cursor adressable screens.
>
> And there’s definitely ways to evolve compatibly.  Linux doesn’t die
> because not everyone uses Yggdrasil anymore.
The difference is that vanilla is not a kernel not a "distro" but both.

The number of kernel developers is relatively big and the number of
GNU/Linux distros is huge, so they come and go without affecting the
kernel at all. There are also some companies implied to support the
kernel in different ways and of course the sort of "monopoly" the kernel
has in some fields like HPC and IOT.

While in our case emacs vanilla IS the distro, with many alternatives
around and a small set of developers doing their best.

So in case of a comparison, maybe openBSD is a more realistic
parallelism... and to compare with a distro you should look at spacemacs
or equivalents. If a distro disappears there are others coming, but if
the kernel disappears (or die) then also the distros will.

> > Every software has a complex social part; and part of that is to satisfy
> > general user's needs (because not all the users must be programmers and
> > even not all programmers have to be lisp programmers or understand the
> > emacs internals).
>
> That’s a false tautology.  Not every piece of software needs to satisfy
> every type of users’ needs.  In fact, software that tries to do that,
> dies.
I agree there, but not every piece of code is emacs. Otherwise we won't
have a music player, eww, mail client, terminal and gui interface,
dired and so on.

We can't expect to do the same than a specialized program (unless we
try). But text editing es something that almost everyone does so almost
everyone needs a text editor.

> --
> İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
> pgp:   024C 30DD 597D 142B 49AC 40EB 465C D949 B101 2427