Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Alex Schroeder <alex@gnu.org>]

This thread seems appropriate to repost the following important message.

From: PerAbrahamsen
Newsgroups: news:comp.emacs, news:alt.religion.emacs
Subject: Re: what's so fun about emacs?
Date: 06 Mar 2000 10:03:44 +0100
Organization: The ChurchOfEmacs
User-Agent: Gnus/5.0804 (Gnus v5.8.4) Emacs/20.4
 
 [...]
 
 Emacs has so much power that nobody will ever master it
 completely. You can always be a stronger user with Emacs. With a
 "simple" editor like pico or notepad, you will quickly master it
 completely, which means that it will not allow you to grow
 further. Sure, it will take a new user a little longer to be
 productive with Emacs than Pico, but by starting with Emacs he will
 have an editor that will grow with him for the rest of his life.
 
 [...]
 
 20 MB is 1 cent worth of disc space. For that 1 cent, you get the
 most powerful text editor in the world, an IDE that supports more
 programming languages "out of the box" than all other IDEs in the world
 combined, the most feature-rich News and Mail reader ever, a web
 browser, a calendar that knows more cultures than you have heard of,
 and your own personal psychotherapist. If you think 1 cent is too
 much for a text editor that has been specially optimized for every
 text processing need in your remaining life, you ought to reevaluate
 your value system.
 
 [...]
 
 What you call "Windows" is just one of many window systems that has
 come in and out of fashion during the lifetime of Emacs. Emacs (in one
 version or another) has supported most of them,
 SunView, NeWS, X10, X11 (Open Look, Athena, Motif), PM,
 Win32, Mac. Emacs has provided a sound foundation that has allowed
 programmers to be productive with all these, and will also provide a
 foundation for whatever window system will be hot tomorrow. 
 
 What Emacs doesn't do is to give up that foundation in order to follow
 the latest trend. Instead, it incorporates what is good and
 compensates for the rest. This -- of course -- will make Emacs feel
 "old" for the followers of hype, but the wise will see its intrinsic
 power and lasting value.