Re: Changes for emacs 28

["Göktuğ Kayaalp" <self@gkayaalp.com>]

On 2020-09-13 15:53 +03, Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> wrote:
> Why the vanilla emacs users almost hasn't increased or has decreases if
> the number of programmers has exponentially grow in the world?  And
> being emacs so powerful and old; how is it possible that it is
> frequently not even listed in the GNU/Linux popular editors articles or
> it is back in the list?  The emacs popularity is so low these days (even
> in GNU/Linux users) that some distros still comes with emacs 24. And if
> we split spacemacs and doom apart it is almost negligible... we are even
> after vim.

Those distros are part of the Emacs community.  And IMHO a very good
part.  With them, a very diverse set of users find ways to make use of
Emacs.

As to why Emacs is not more popular, well, why should it be popular in
the first place?  I’d say Emacs has thrived in the last decade and
personally I’d fancy a stable but content community over a large one.

> How the emacs modifications (specially spacemacs) have found a set of
> frequent developers, and a big younger community? (which is not bigger
> because it is a bit overloaded of external packages IMO)

Because they are producing great software that helps people in ways
Emacs core may not.

> How is it possible that all those dummy and young editors have multiple
> times more users and community than Emacs when they don't really bring
> anything much better than us?

That’s insulting to the users and developers of those editors, which
are, again, great software.

> Are we sure we don't need that "fresh air", "new ideas" and "lot of
> work" to be happening in vanilla directly? Even if we (former users)
> disagree with some of them and have to add 3, 4 or 10 extra lines to our
> config to disable them?

Nobody’s against that so long as breakage is not _disastrous_.  And
certain changes proposed, like those regarding default colours, have the
potential to be so.

It’s not our configs.  It’s many packages that are built upon those
values.  Ultimately software evolves and APIs get outdated, but big
changes should be done with as much discussion and criticism as
possible, so please don’t think that the more conservative members of
the community are trying to hamper the development of Emacs or are
gatekeeping.  Everyone’s views are important and necessary.

> I think that when emacs was created it was a revolutionary thing; it
> brought an "easier" way to do "complex" things in that time's standard
> and broke many paradigms. Why now we constantly insist in "paradigm of
> computing" and "historic reasons" or "because in the 90's ..."? I am a
> big supporter of backward compatibility, but sometimes the problem
> becomes "evolve or die".

You’re over-dramatising it.  Emacs was a nice idea that built upon the
paradigm of software it was created in.  Lisp machines, screen editors
becoming a thing after the introduction of cursor adressable screens.

And there’s definitely ways to evolve compatibly.  Linux doesn’t die
because not everyone uses Yggdrasil anymore.

> Every software has a complex social part; and part of that is to satisfy
> general user's needs (because not all the users must be programmers and
> even not all programmers have to be lisp programmers or understand the
> emacs internals).

That’s a false tautology.  Not every piece of software needs to satisfy
every type of users’ needs.  In fact, software that tries to do that,
dies.



--
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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