Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

On 12 May 2020, excalamus--- via "Emacs development discussions." wrote:
>May 11, 2020, 23:12 by rms@gnu.org:
>What are we competing for?  I feel that while other threads are
>examining "missing features", it would be helpful to examine what GNU
>Emacs does offer.  Not only in software features, but maybe also in
>philosophy, community, or tradition.
>
>What is it about GNU Emacs that makes this mailing list bustle with
>enthusiasm?  Other editors use GPL, provide source code, have
>documentation, are customizable, and extendable.  There's something
>in how GNU Emacs implements these that is different.  I feel like
>there are taters to find if we dig a little.
>
>Is it because Emacs Lisp is unique to Emacs that Emacs teaches as
>well as documents?
>Is it that by being a pseudo-Lisp machine, Emacs puts users in the
>zone of proximal development?
>Is GNU Emacs the best embodiment of the GNU philosophy? 

Sure, I'll take the bait:

To the best of my knowledge, no other editing environment rewards sustained user investment so well.

With Emacs, if you keep investing -- i.e., acquiring knowledge and skill by reading documentation, writing customizations, and exploring others' customizations -- Emacs keeps rewarding you with a better and better editing experience.  The degree to which it does this seems normal to many of us here, because we've been used to it for many years.  I think we sometimes fail to appreciate the degree to which non-users, potential ("Emacs-curious") users, and even many actual new users are *not* aware of it: they don't realize how enormous the reward can be, and how broad its scope.

This should probably affect how we think about promoting Emacs.  Emacs shouldn't necessarily try to attract everyone who needs to edit text [1].  Many people who edit text nonetheless don't view text editing as a primary activity worthy of investment.  Those users are not good candidates for Emacs.

Emacs's best prospects are with the sorts of people who *do* see -- or who can be persuaded to see -- text editing as worthy of investment.  There's a loose correlation in which good programmers tend to be those sorts of people, because good programmers are usually willing to invest in learning their tools in general.  E.g., they'll learn their text editor the same way they'll learn their debugger, their programming framework, etc.  But the set isn't limited to just programmers.  For example, scientists and other academics who edit LaTeX documents are often good candidates for Emacs usage, because by both temperament and life situation they are well-positioned to understand how sustained investment in learning their editing environment could pay off in the long term.

So I suggest that GNU Emacs's raison d'être is to be the text editor that best rewards sustained user investment.

I think Emacs actually does so right now, too, and that we just haven't always communicated this fact clearly enough.

Thus, instead of focusing on making Emacs easier for new users, it would be better to focus on smoothing out discontinuities in Emacs' investment-reward curve.  The long-term health of Emacs as a project will not come from a large number of lightly committed users who don't appreciate what makes Emacs unique, but rather from a smaller number of users for whom Emacs is important and irreplaceable.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't improve the new-user experience in Emacs, of course.  We should make it as easy as possible for newcomers *while still prioritizing invested users*.   In user experience design, there are frequently tradeoffs between making things easy for newcomers and making them rewarding for experts.  Unfortunately, too often in design discussions, the new user experience automatically wins out -- it's like some kind of magic card that people play (even sometimes unconsciously) in UI/UX discussions.  For Emacs, this would be a mistake.  Emacs's great strength will never be in its new-user experience, and this is in some ways a necessary consequence of Emacs being so great for highly invested long-term users.

This also suggests that the sorts of features that highly-invested users tend to want -- for example, LSP-based features -- should be more important to us than how square the menus are or what menu items are shown in a default startup configuration.  When we make decisions that disappoint the core user base, we endanger the project much more than when we make decisions that disappoint users (or potential users) who weren't likely to become highly invested anyway.

(The fact that Emacs promotes free software by being a good GPL'd program is nice too, and is important to many of us, but it's not unique to Emacs.)

Best regards,
-Karl