Re: History Re: Debunking Emacs merits over GUI - Re: package for Email

[David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de>,  "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org"
>>  <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
>> Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:04:08 -0800
>> 
>> 2. Free Software
>> 
>> While RMS' goal may have been laudable, many (most) programmers could
>> not see how to monetize their work in a free software environment and,
>> so, went where the money was more plentiful.  Without the investment of
>> big bucks that copyrighted software could command, development of Emacs
>> in the 90s slowed to a crawl and depended on the programmer "with an
>> itch".
>
> The "slowed to a crawl" part doesn't match the facts: the rate of
> commits in the 90s doesn't fall below that of 2000s or 2010s.  In
> particular, addition of GUI X frames and m18n (a.k.a. "MULE") to Emacs
> belong to the 90s: hardly a non-development.  And the development of
> the current display engine started in 1998 and ended in 2000, so
> technically also a "90s" feature.  Not bad for "capital-deprived"
> project!

You're right. That was impertinent of me.  While I used it in my work, I
was not on the development of Emacs.

Wasn't the display engine derived from Lucid Emacs?

>> 5. Smartphones
>> 
>> The iPhone is still not capable of supporting Emacs and I don't know how
>> well Android could support Emacs.
>
> See the feature/android branch in the Emacs Git repository.

Ooo  8)

>> Even if they could support Emacs, Smartphones are GUI-intensive, so
>> not really an environment for a text editor.
>
> Not true, at least not in such an absolute wording.  Smartphones do
> provide apps to edit text, and many people would like access to their
> Org and TODO lists on the smartphone, let alone read email.

True.  BeOrg provides a bridge, but it's certainly not Emacs.  The base
of Emacs seems keyboard-driven and you're not going to do a lot of
keyboarding on a smartphone (thus the GUI remark).

> Bottom line: when you are trying to make a point, don't overdo it, and
> always check against the actual facts.

Good point

-- 
David Masterson