On 6/25/2012 1:51 AM, rusi wrote:

I believe that one of the biggest obstacles to widespread emacs
adoption is (e)lisp.
Unfortunately at this point the discussion invariably degenerates into
a bad miscombination of  technical and sociological framing.

If the issue is technical, then encouraging development is out-of-
bounds
If the issue is social -- how to get today's kids interested in emacs
-- and I start with the slogan LEARN ELISP -- I need to go to
marketing kindergarten

At FSF's annual LibrePlanet Conference just a few months ago, Ruby creator Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto gave a talk entitled, "How Emacs changed my life". In that talk, he spoke of the great amount of time he spent in the early 1990s studying the Emacs source code. He said he learned a lot from that about good programming practices and he applied those lessons when he designed Ruby.

You wrote: "If the issue is social -- how to get today's kids interested in emacs -- and I start with the slogan LEARN ELISP -- I need to go to marketing kindergarten."

On the other hand, if someone with street cred like Matz says it, some of today's "kids" might take up the challenge. What about a logo like this linked to a video of Matz' "How Emacs changed my life" talk posted on youtube.com?

Mark Rosenthal
mbr@arlsoft.com