Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Abraham S.A.H." via "Emacs development discussions. wrote:

> Another problem is that most of those newcomers start doing
> that without reading Emacs' manual.  Now, that one has to be
> clearly discouraged.

We can assume the opposite, that people will not read it.
I don't know if "everyone" did that in the 70s, in the 90/00s
only the most dedicated guys read books and manuals and now,
we can assume that this is an almost foreign concept to young
people. Why on Earth should you read a book if you want to use
software, what does that have to do with it and why not just
use the software right now?

And while it is good there is documentation, these people
thinking like that are not entirely wrong. I start to agree
with them more and more.

> Doesn't matter how intuitive an interface is designed, it's
> always good to come with a manual, and Emacs comes with
> a very good one.

Those are different things, let's do both as good as we can
and as much energy people feel it is meaningful to put
into it. Improve documentation, improve interface, improve
computation, improve some alternative backend that no one
ever heard of - we take it.

Everything that makes it better and make people active, with
us. Enough with the long period of everyone piling up their
own .emacs - can't have that anymore, there are too few of us
to afford it.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal