Re: Emacs learning curve

[Tom]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv <at> wanadoo.es> writes:
> 
> Not really, the long term investment should be to teach modern terms to
> Emacs, instead of insisting on forcing every newcomer to learn the Emacs
> terms.
> 

Exactly.

Most of the time when I tell people about Emacs they try it and they say
it's too alien and completion for popular languages (Java, C#) is much
better in other tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc).

So in order to attract more new blood to Emacs there are two possible
ways:

1. Do something which people care about much better than other tools.
Completion comes to mind first, it should be very very good and it should
work out of the box without any addition configuration.

Due to the limited development resources for Emacs (I don't know how
many paid developers work on it, but I guess not many) it's not a 
realistic expectation.


2. The other way is to make Emacs more accessible to newbies. Basic things
should work out of the box as they work in other applications (e.g.
why should one use a different paste key just in emacs when C-v works fine
everywhere else?).

Ease of entry should be the main target, because more users means more
hackers too (some of them will come up with new ideas and contribute 
code), and more hackers means more resources for development which helps
catching up with other editors in features which people consider basic
in these days (e.g excellent completion out of the box).