Fedora 12: Emacs is not for software development

Yaakov Nemoy loupgaroublond at gmail.com
Sun Nov 29 11:27:45 UTC 2009


2009/11/29 Gregory Hosler <ghosler at redhat.com>:
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> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> On 11/28/2009 02:32 AM, Debayan Banerjee wrote:
>>> 2009/11/28 Rahul Sundaram
>>>
>>>> Why? It's just shows your personal preference for a editor. Emacs is
>>>> certainly not needed for software development.
>>> Well one does need an editor for development. Assuming vim and emacs
>>> have roughly equal user bases, chosing emacs over vim for the
>>> distribution shows Fedora packagers' personal preference too. I guess
>>> both vim and emacs should be available.
>>
>> First of all, I don't think we have enough data to determine which
>> editor is being used by developers. How did you come up with the roughly
>> 50/50 estimate?  I am sure we need a editor for development but I might
>> be using Eclipse or even Anjuta? IMO, it can be listed as a optional
>> package in the group and not more than that.
>
> Um...
>
> emacs is more than just an editor. Advanced users of emacs use emacs as a shell
> from which they
>
>        - edit the source
>        - invoke the compile/make process from WITHIN emacs
>        - run the application from WITHIN emacs
>        - if the application crashes, then the debugger comes up WITHIN emacs,
>          and allows them to debug the application, look at the source code,
>          etc. All from within emacs.
>
> While I readily admit that most emacs users probably don't use these advanced
> features of emacs, I would argue that emacs DOES belong in the development
> group. Those that leave it out of that group are simply unaware of what emcas
> can and does do...

From my point of view, a development tool is something like make, or a compiler. Just because your editor can interface with it, that doesn't make it defacto a development tool.

From that perspective, emacs should not be in a development category. It should be in a "Kitchen Sink" category.

The real truth is that this is just semantics, and i'd rather see labelling and tags over predefined groups. But show me a real usability study that shows that this group division is causing trouble to users and that they are having trouble getting their work done. Then show me that the one time effort of installing a package on a fresh system is so important compared to daily activity that we really need to bother with this. Then we can discuss which category emacs should be in. Our personal intuitions won't give us the right answer.

-Yaakov
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