Whether intentionally or not you seem to have directly reinforced the argument I was making.
>Why from the outside? You're, quite literally, one command away from being on the inside: "M-x ielm"
I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. By opening with what I'm sure is an oh-so-witty commit like this you signal that you aren't going to engage honestly in this debate.
>Emacs is very popular amongst emacs-users
It's like you didn't even read what I wrote, and instead you've constructed a straw man to argue with. I think it's pretty obvious I was using "more popular" to refer to "attracting new emacs users".
>GNU nano, GNU ed, GNU moe, GNU emacs
Again, not sure what the point of just listing a bunch of editors is. Your entire comment is pretty much one giant non-sequitur.
>Obviously the emacs community is going to care about software freedom. I don't understand how anyone would expect differently.
Again, it's like you didn't want to respond to what I actually wrote. You seem to be responding to what you wish I wrote.
I never implied that I expect the Emacs project not to care about freedom at all, merely that I think it's silly to prioritize freedom at the expense of everything else. Is Free Software of any utility if nobody uses it? Or is it merely intellectual masturbation?
The default emacs experience is clunky, ugly, and dated. It turns people away. This is an objective truth.
I categorically reject the idea that polished software is mutually exclusive of free software. I think emacs would do a better job of promoting the use of free software if emacs had a better onboarding experience and was more user-friendly, and I think it can achieve this goal without betraying the principles of Freedom on which it was founded. And yet at any suggestion of this, RMS and the other grognards are content to ridicule and belittle (just as you have done here) rather than engage honestly in the arguments being presented.
>The very least one can do when addressing perceived flaws/warts/roadblocks, is to accompany them with a snippet of code, so users/developers can actually experience these suggested improvements.
Are you seriously suggesting I should post a patch to HN? It's comments like this that leave the very distinct impression you're just trying to shield yourself from any criticism rather than have to confront viewpoints that challenge the status quo of the emacs project.
> >Why from the outside? You're, quite literally, one command away from being on the inside: "M-x ielm"
> I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. By opening with what I'm sure is an oh-so-witty commit like this you signal that you aren't going to engage honestly in this debate.
I don't think that he was trying to make a 'witty' or snarky comment, just pointing out that anyone who wants to can be 'inside' Emacs development simply by firing up Emacs and running ielm (the interactive Emacs Lisp mode). It's an Emacs REPL: one has exactly as much power in it as anyone on the dev team. If you want to, you can even recompile the C bits …
> I categorically reject the idea that polished software is mutually exclusive of free software.
FWIW, I agree. I think that the default Emacs look could be a lot better.
>one has exactly as much power in it as anyone on the dev team
Technically, perhaps, but not politically. In that respect everyone who is not a core maintainer is an outsider. The latter is more relevant when trying to get the project to change. Sure, I can make my own emacs look nice but that doesn't change the default.
>Why from the outside? You're, quite literally, one command away from being on the inside: "M-x ielm"
I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. By opening with what I'm sure is an oh-so-witty commit like this you signal that you aren't going to engage honestly in this debate.
>Emacs is very popular amongst emacs-users
It's like you didn't even read what I wrote, and instead you've constructed a straw man to argue with. I think it's pretty obvious I was using "more popular" to refer to "attracting new emacs users".
>GNU nano, GNU ed, GNU moe, GNU emacs
Again, not sure what the point of just listing a bunch of editors is. Your entire comment is pretty much one giant non-sequitur.
>Obviously the emacs community is going to care about software freedom. I don't understand how anyone would expect differently.
Again, it's like you didn't want to respond to what I actually wrote. You seem to be responding to what you wish I wrote.
I never implied that I expect the Emacs project not to care about freedom at all, merely that I think it's silly to prioritize freedom at the expense of everything else. Is Free Software of any utility if nobody uses it? Or is it merely intellectual masturbation?
The default emacs experience is clunky, ugly, and dated. It turns people away. This is an objective truth.
I categorically reject the idea that polished software is mutually exclusive of free software. I think emacs would do a better job of promoting the use of free software if emacs had a better onboarding experience and was more user-friendly, and I think it can achieve this goal without betraying the principles of Freedom on which it was founded. And yet at any suggestion of this, RMS and the other grognards are content to ridicule and belittle (just as you have done here) rather than engage honestly in the arguments being presented.
>The very least one can do when addressing perceived flaws/warts/roadblocks, is to accompany them with a snippet of code, so users/developers can actually experience these suggested improvements.
Are you seriously suggesting I should post a patch to HN? It's comments like this that leave the very distinct impression you're just trying to shield yourself from any criticism rather than have to confront viewpoints that challenge the status quo of the emacs project.