Hacker News Reader

Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I don't get: People don't seem to have any problems with learning entirely new programming languages every year, but if you ask them to learn a new editor they get up in arms about it.

I think if people spent half the effort on learning emacs as they do learning the languages that emacs works well with (lisps, mainly) they'd pick it up just fine.

(I'm not advocating forcing anyone to use emacs, fortunately there are a lot of other options. I just don't get the hand-wringing around saying it works the best for a given language.)

View on HN

You mean C-like programming languages? It's pretty easy to learn a language shallowly when it is similar to everything else.

I don't know, I don't try to learn a new language every year. It seems like a lot of people who do make their way through Ruby, Python, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Scala; they all seem pretty dissimilar to me.

The people who learn entirely new programming languages every year already use emacs.

that's a pretty ridiculous generalization to make...

... but I suspect it to be largely true. I'd be hard pressed for finding a nicer, gui-ish-er editor that supports Haskell, C/C++ (with templates'n'stuff), Python/Cython, Java, Lisp/Scheme, shell and whatnot equally well.

Ok, it's just font highlighting and indentation help, while a good Java IDE does much more (i.e. completion, refactoring), but still it's nice to have one editor that works reasonably well with everything you decide to throw at it. (And yes, editing Cython code without Cython- or at least Python-mode feels like you're missing a finger).

Sure, Emacs is nice, but there are a lot of smart people using vi. Or Textmate. Or...

Exactly. It meant more: a customizable, scriptable editor that is more geared toward being adaptable to lots of things rather than (a) being extremely simple (e.g., pico, nano) or (b) being tailored towards one very specific thing (Eclipse, Netbeans).

(b) is strange when you look at it - Eclipse's PyDev and NetBean's python support are in fact very decent IDEs for Python, but they force you to do everything the Eclipse (or Netbeans) way.

The language I use to build software with is precious to me. It's capabilities are often key to what I can do, how I can express myself.

The editor I use to write code is a commodity. Will switching to emacs help me write better software? Solve harder problems? No, it'll help me sling text faster -- which, unless you're doing fairly pedestrian things, is the least interesting, least common thing you should be doing each day.

"Will switching to emacs help me write better software? Solve harder problems?"

It will HELP you write better software, yes. Solve harder problems? It will help you solve harder problems FASTER maybe.

Indeed. Typing in the actual program text is both the least important task and the most important task. The program text is not what solves your problem, but without the program text, you don't have something you can actually run.

Spending less time dealing with the program text is a great way to be able to spend more time thinking or tinkering. A good text editor facilitates this.

(And of course, Emacs is more than an editor.)

Brian (the post's author) cited a year before he was proficient in emacs. I spent two months with it myself once, with nothing but frustration to show for it, so I can believe him on that front.

That's a huge opportunity cost, when I know I can get the job done efficiently using far more pleasant tools that I already know. Those that want to promote emacs need to come up with real, tangible benefits that I'll be able to realize that will reliably offset that cost and then some. Rainbow parens aren't going to cut it. (That's an honest challenge, FWIW, despite the seasoning of snark. ;-))

Nobody wants to promote Emacs. The users are just so happy that they feel the need to share the experience.

Example: I have an expensive keyboard imported from Japan. When I tell people about it (and let them try it), they order one immediately or they come up with some reason why they don't like it and then want to have an argument? But I don't care! I'm not in the business of selling keyboards, I'm just a happy user. Buy one, don't buy one, it's all the same with me.

Emacs is the same way. Everything I've needed in Emacs I've written myself. Other like-minded people have written other things I like. More users would mean more extensions, but it doesn't really matter, there are already enough. So if you want to use Notepad, knock yourself out. It's your life.

Emacs is more than just slinging text. If you spend time in emacs you probably have it configured so that you rarely ever need to get out of emacs to get almost anything done. This doesn't happen over night though, your emacs config slowly evolves into something better than just a text editor.

It isn't really about slinging text faster, it is about editing code faster, freeing up more cycles for thinking. A great editor experience, whatever that means for you, can certainly help you write better software, and can give you more time to think about those harder problems. It reminds me of that tired old adage that you spend a third of your life asleep so you should have a comfy bed - you spend a lot of time in your editor, so it should be comfy. This isn't an argument for emacs or any other specific editor, but against the idea that your editor is a commodity not worth consideration.

Commodities are worth consideration, just not maximal optimization when there are switching costs involved. My core point was, editing code isn't the bottleneck in building quality software efficiently, so optimizing that process beyond a certain point is premature and wasteful.

Emacs is important in expressing myself. I use it more than any programming language, and also outside the context of programming. It's a rich computer in its own right, in many ways better than the underlying one.

Like Clojure, it's a friendly parasite on the underlying platform. Both are part of my programming experience; and both are invisible for most of my software's users.

But I agree, Emacs is tough to learn (especially if there isn't other emacs user nearby) and is a barrier to entry for anything which depends on it. And the emacs experience could be much improved. I don't know why it hasn't been far exceeded in nearly all ways.

I'm not the standard user of emacs, but as an arts student in university, I have to write a lot of papers. I write, using LaTeX in emacs, and it has dramatically increased the speed in which I can write. More important is probably the editing portion of it. I don't have to worry about fooling around with font sizes and formatting, that if I make this bold it might make the rest, etc. all those little annoyances that come with a large word processor. I just want to write. Emacs lets me do that.

Of course, I'm not comparing emacs to vim, but to something like Word. I plan to learn vim in the next few months.

The problem is that it takes ten years to learn emacs. Don't take my word for it, because I haven't: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2009/07/learn-emacs-in-ten-years .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com