On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:05:14 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years. And I have the increasing feeling > > that my students are getting fedup with it (and me). Used Idle for my last > > python > > course without too much grief. If only it were an option for 25 > > programming languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and. > > Not sure whether you're making the point deliberately or accidentally, > but that's exactly why emacs is so big and heavy: "if only, if only". > Simpler things do less.
Well Almost. Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" At a time when 8 MB was large. Is it today? So let me ask you: Do you not use ½ dozen (at least) languages? And their interpreters (when they exist) And their ancilliary tools (make autoconf etc) And do you not type plain text? Emails? PIM (reminders, timesheets and planning) Docs (more fancy than plain text, maybe libreoffice/MS/latex...) Lilypond? Use, experiment, play-around with (non-ASCII) unicode? If you have one app to do them all, I'd like (and pay!) for it If not I bet they are mutually inconsistent. No... Emacs is big (its not actually) and heavy (yeah) because there's no BDFL to clean up the mess and take the flak. Lehman's law of software deterioration (7th in this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_evolution ) is about as inexorable as entropy in thermodynamics -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
