May 13, 2020, 12:18 by kfogel@red-bean.com:

Sure, I'll take the bait:

Thank you for your thoughts! Apologies if it appeared like I was trying to trap anyone or pick an argument. My intention was to ask something like, "What does Emacs do well and how might we apply that strength more effectively?". In that sense, it was more like a runner trying to best last week's time rather than trying to arrive first at the finish line. But I also wasn't sure if there was a specific finish line in mind (singular, plural, fixed, or movable).

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 like the idea of "focus on smoothing out discontinuities in Emacs' investment-reward curve." I think there be taters there.

What makes GNU Emacs unique? After all, there's ITS Emacs, Gosling Emacs, XEmacs, and DrRacket (at least).

Here's how I think Emacs, if not GNU Emacs, is unique:

Emacs is an editor with a heart and a soul. Its beats to a rhythm of compile, eval, garbage collect, transforming code into action. It performs the raw mechanical functions an application needs to do. But it also has an intangible quality aficionados recognize. Like a soul, it's difficult to explain and you probably feel silly trying to. I think being able to explain that to people would be a tremendous advantage.

I came to Emacs from the mundane need to track work hours (achieved with Org mode). Emacs' ability to introspect, the marvelous "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp", and it's unique ability for the user to Choose Your Own Programming Adventure led me to Free Software and to change my career to software development. It changed my life, or at least the way I look at it. I don't think other editors, or even other GNU projects, exist in a realm where that kind of thing is possible. It seems to me that Emacs is unique because it occupies a unique space between user and creator. If that's so, are there ways we might exploit that?

Education is one investment-reward domain. In what other domains might Emacs be well poised?