Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>]

 > A couple years ago, after using and loving Emacs for 15 years, I moved
 > all my Java development into Eclipse.  I did this despite the facts
 > that Eclipse's editor is amazingly bad and its UI is clunky and
 > impossible to customize.
 > 
 > The reason I did this is that Eclipse provides a number of compelling
 > features which Emacs does not.  At least, it does for Java -- for
 > other programming languages it is not nearly as useful, IME.
 > 
 > * An integrated Java compiler that knows about your whole project.
 >   This has a number of nice implications:
 > 
 >   * No more waiting.  It compiles while you type.  When you save a
 >     file you are ready to run your tests immediately.
 >   * Class browsing, call hierarchy information ("find all callers of
 >     this method"), intelligent completion, documentation and API help
 >     while you type.

[snip - long list]

Yes, I agree.  While Emacs has certainly moved forward over the last few years,
relatively it's fallen behind and I suspect many users are moving to other
applications like Eclipse.  It's a vicious circle: if we are ever to catch up
we need more developers and attract them we need more users.  That's why I
think it's counterproductive to hold back releases for bugs like:

** eric@openbsd.org, 24 Nov: c-mode syntactic analysis regression in emacs-22.1

which might irritate some people but will hardly drive people away from using
Emacs in large numbers.

A bug tracker could record such bugs and track its status.  In my experience,
such bugs do get fixed, albeit several releases later.

However, if the issue is ideological, i.e., that code is not released with any
known bugs is more important than having a user base then there is no argument,
of course.

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob