Re:The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
by grae_QED on Friday August 06, 2021 @04:58PM
(#28092646)
I should have clarified...
>Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world.
I was really responding to this. You're right though: there are aspects of Emacs that are dated, the UI isn't very spiffy, and I've never dealt with elisp before so I'll take your--and everyone else's--word for that. I was just suggesting that it gets the job done for a lot of people and maybe, as a result, shouldn't be classified as outdated.
Re:The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
by anyfoo on Friday August 06, 2021 @05:13PM
(#28092805)
It's true that I maybe made it seem a bit too much like emacs itself was outdated. But really I think that it is built on outdated paradigms, which hinders its development and presentation a bit. I was fully serious when I said I cannot imagine switching to anything else (and I'm not afraid of switching otherwise), it's still the best we have in my mind.
No matter what, emacs still feels "alien" in my OS's desktop interface with its UI concept, and never fully integrates. That's fine if you don't want it to integrate, but I actually like some concepts of my OS's UI a lot, and miss them in emacs.
And elisp is not a very good language, born of a time where programming languages still had a long way to go (at least in the mainstream, academically it always seems a bit different to me). They are actively trying to fix things, e.g. the adoption of lexical binding, but the scope of this effort also shows how emacs is a very big ship that is hard to change course.
Someone else mentioned lack of proper multi-threading in another comment now, and this is also very noticeable.