Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[PT <mailshield.gg@mailnull.com>]

On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:16:24 +0100, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

> PT <mailshield.gg@mailnull.com> writes:
>
>> On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:22:49 +0100, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The question is: is more people using Emacs a good thing at all?
>>>> Or is it only an additional burden (more clueless people on the
>>>> help forums, etc.)?
>>>
>>> You are trying to frame loaded questions.
>>
>> No, it was a sincere question. And if the answer is no, it's not a
>> good thing then I'm okay with it.
>>
>>> What is "a good thing"?
>>> More people using Emacs is not a worthwhile objective per se.  If it
>>> were, we should replace Emacs by toiletpaper, and its user base would
>>> explode.  A worthwhile objective for a developer is to have Emacs
>>> become a more productive tool for his work.  This is not unrelated to
>>> the size of its user base, since developers usually tend to start out
>>> as users.
>>
>> Exactly. I don't know what resources are at the emacs developers'
>> disposal (do they work on it on their free time? is some of them
>> paid to work on Emacs?),
>
> Most work on Emacs in their free time.  There have been times in the
> past where a main developer got employed by the FSF for completing a
> particular essential task or feature.
>
>> but if companies see more value in emacs then they might even
>> sponsor developing some new features for them.
>
> Emacs has a rather strict copyright assignment policy to the FSF, and
> it has a rather strict "if RMS does not think it a good idea right
> now, it does not get in" policy.  While there have been corporate or
> at least institutional contributions (in particular MULE comes to
> mind), this is by no means easy to do.

[...]

> Emacs has not shown itself to accommodate systematic corporate
> involvement well.  It will as far as I can see always be dependent on
> dedicated individuals instead of corporate support, simply because you
> can't make a business plan involving Emacs development and timelines.

I see. In that case there really is no obvious benefit of devoting  
resources to make Emacs more newbie friendly.

BTW, it seems Eclipse will fill this space instead of Emacs. It is   
universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing  
in particular.

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