Tory Anderson has an interesting take on modern day Emacs. He starts by reviewing the problems that Emacs was created to solve. He starts with Bernard S. Greenberg’s 1979 paper on Multics Emacs, which I wrote about two and half years ago. He mentions the main problems that Greenberg and his colleagues had to solve:
- Memory constraints
- Long program compilation times
- The arduous learning curve of existent text processing tools
As Anderson notes, those are no longer problems. For example, memory scarcity from a text editor point of view long ago ceased to be a problem. So he moves on to consider what benefits Emacs offers us in 2021.
His first and most important offering is what he terms “stability”. Emacs continues to provide programmers and other Emacs users with the tools they need to get things done. What worked 10, 15, or 20 years ago still works today and in basically the same way. There’s no need a learn a new tool every year or two. At the same time, Emacs continues to evolve to support new programming languages and solve new problems.
He also makes a point that always gets me labeled an elitist jerk when I mention it: because those looking for easy solutions shy away from Emacs, those that do take the trouble to learn and master it tend to be the smarter more talented engineers1.
The TL;DR is that Emacs is still solving problems and despite the snark there’s plenty of reasons you might want to use software that’s over four decades old.
Footnotes:
This isn’t a Vi vs. Emacs thing. The same can be said of Vi or Vim.