I have never tried to contribute to emacs, so perhaps it is horrible. I did not like this post (Medium tends to live up to its name in terms of quality), however. It read, to me, like “please do things the way I like them, oh and please do all the work to make things how I like them”. The “open letter” style also feels a lot like shaming to me, rather than trying to engage the community. What if the author came to the community and said “hey, I’d like to help make the development better, would anyone mind if I setup <blah> and then we tried to do X?” Or “hey, I setup <blah> and this bug that was ran into <here> was spotted early, maybe it’s worth the community moving over to <here>”. The open letter also assumes that Emacs wants lots more contributors. Maybe it does, I don’t know, but that isn’t always true.
Not sure what to make of this one. The author makes a few valid points, but there are some holes. Communication channels with Emacs developers are “terrible” - is this simply because of the use of email? I’ve used debbugs a fair bit in the past and never thought it was “awful awful awful”, but perhaps I’m of an age where functionality matters more than a point-n-click UI - that said, I do like the Github UI for the most part).
He does raise a few other more interesting points though - he is of the opinion that open source developers are happy to use lots of non-FOSS tooling, which seems to be a step backwards. I’m certainly not a zealot in the RMS mould, but I have a feeling this move towards using popular-but-not-FOSS tools like Slack (which he doesn’t mention, but I’ve seen a lot of movement to it) is at some point going to bite the FOSS community as a whole.
And finally…
We’d use IRC with history if it was easy to use.
Not even sure how to respond to that - is IRC really that hard to use?
Sorry, my comment is all over the place - struggling to try and write something coherent!
I’ve never - not for a lack of trying - managed to get someone to start using IRC.
Was it a technical or non-technical audience? I agree that IRC can be daunting for those who aren’t technical, but I’d assume it’s not a problem for software developers wanting to contribute to a 40-year old Unix-centric text editor (yes, Emacs isn’t just a text editor, but you get my meaning ;) Heck, I’m guessing that most users won’t have a problem using IRC - Emacs is not exactly renowned for its out-the-box user friendliness.
I have a few times. A previous research group I was at started an IRC channel for general chat / link sharing / etc., and we got most people on board, most of whom had never used IRC before. The easiest was people who already used a multi-protocol IM client, e.g. several members of the group already used Trillian, so it was easy for them to just add IRC as another thing to auto-join along with the networks they were already using (AIM, MSN, etc.). For people who didn’t already use an IM client, there was a hyperlink to open the channel in Mibbit in the browser.
Communication channels with Emacs developers are “terrible” - is this simply because of the use of email?
When I tried to contribute to Emacs, there was a lot of derisive attitude and “why would you even want to do that” towards suggestions because they were different. I think part of it is a defense mechanism against never-ending discussions of why Emacs just has to be different for the sake of being different–these arguments get old really quick and have a tendency to go nowhere, but in my experience I feel like I got pattern matched against that and dismissed.
That said I haven’t really interacted with the emacs-devel mailing list in the past 7 years or so. Perhaps it’s gotten better.
I guess Emacs has never had the best reputation for adopting change - cf. the XEmacs (née Lucid Emacs) fork. I don’t follow the community, but in late 2014 they did migrate from bazaar to git, so perhaps nowadays they’re more amenable to change than in the past?
The tone of this article is a bit disrespectful, IMO.
Some random guy, working on a project few people have heard of, lecturing the developers of an ancient, hugely popular open source project about how they should be using a bunch of shiny tools that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, much less 40 years ago when Emacs was starting out. Maybe next he can write an open letter to Linus explaining how kernel development is supposed to work.
I’m not saying Emacs development is perfect, but they recently switched to Git, elected a new maintainer, and have made other changes. A project like Emacs has a lot of vested interests, and they’re not going to drop everything just because some guy doesn’t like mailing lists and IRC.
Pretty low quality post. It really seems like the chief complaint is: “The emacs project doesn’t work like projects developed last week”. I’m getting tired of the assumption that newer is better. Sorry to say this but given that the industry is fashion driven and people enjoy reinventing the wheel, newer tools usually offer a small subset of functionality.
I have never tried to contribute to emacs, so perhaps it is horrible. I did not like this post (Medium tends to live up to its name in terms of quality), however. It read, to me, like “please do things the way I like them, oh and please do all the work to make things how I like them”. The “open letter” style also feels a lot like shaming to me, rather than trying to engage the community. What if the author came to the community and said “hey, I’d like to help make the development better, would anyone mind if I setup <blah> and then we tried to do X?” Or “hey, I setup <blah> and this bug that was ran into <here> was spotted early, maybe it’s worth the community moving over to <here>”. The open letter also assumes that Emacs wants lots more contributors. Maybe it does, I don’t know, but that isn’t always true.
Not sure what to make of this one. The author makes a few valid points, but there are some holes. Communication channels with Emacs developers are “terrible” - is this simply because of the use of email? I’ve used debbugs a fair bit in the past and never thought it was “awful awful awful”, but perhaps I’m of an age where functionality matters more than a point-n-click UI - that said, I do like the Github UI for the most part).
He does raise a few other more interesting points though - he is of the opinion that open source developers are happy to use lots of non-FOSS tooling, which seems to be a step backwards. I’m certainly not a zealot in the RMS mould, but I have a feeling this move towards using popular-but-not-FOSS tools like Slack (which he doesn’t mention, but I’ve seen a lot of movement to it) is at some point going to bite the FOSS community as a whole.
And finally…
Not even sure how to respond to that - is IRC really that hard to use?
Sorry, my comment is all over the place - struggling to try and write something coherent!
I’ve never - not for a lack of trying - managed to get someone to start using IRC.
I can only conclude that it is not easy to learn to use IRC.
Was it a technical or non-technical audience? I agree that IRC can be daunting for those who aren’t technical, but I’d assume it’s not a problem for software developers wanting to contribute to a 40-year old Unix-centric text editor (yes, Emacs isn’t just a text editor, but you get my meaning ;) Heck, I’m guessing that most users won’t have a problem using IRC - Emacs is not exactly renowned for its out-the-box user friendliness.
I have a few times. A previous research group I was at started an IRC channel for general chat / link sharing / etc., and we got most people on board, most of whom had never used IRC before. The easiest was people who already used a multi-protocol IM client, e.g. several members of the group already used Trillian, so it was easy for them to just add IRC as another thing to auto-join along with the networks they were already using (AIM, MSN, etc.). For people who didn’t already use an IM client, there was a hyperlink to open the channel in Mibbit in the browser.
When I tried to contribute to Emacs, there was a lot of derisive attitude and “why would you even want to do that” towards suggestions because they were different. I think part of it is a defense mechanism against never-ending discussions of why Emacs just has to be different for the sake of being different–these arguments get old really quick and have a tendency to go nowhere, but in my experience I feel like I got pattern matched against that and dismissed.
That said I haven’t really interacted with the emacs-devel mailing list in the past 7 years or so. Perhaps it’s gotten better.
I guess Emacs has never had the best reputation for adopting change - cf. the XEmacs (née Lucid Emacs) fork. I don’t follow the community, but in late 2014 they did migrate from bazaar to git, so perhaps nowadays they’re more amenable to change than in the past?
The tone of this article is a bit disrespectful, IMO.
Some random guy, working on a project few people have heard of, lecturing the developers of an ancient, hugely popular open source project about how they should be using a bunch of shiny tools that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, much less 40 years ago when Emacs was starting out. Maybe next he can write an open letter to Linus explaining how kernel development is supposed to work.
I’m not saying Emacs development is perfect, but they recently switched to Git, elected a new maintainer, and have made other changes. A project like Emacs has a lot of vested interests, and they’re not going to drop everything just because some guy doesn’t like mailing lists and IRC.
Pretty low quality post. It really seems like the chief complaint is: “The emacs project doesn’t work like projects developed last week”. I’m getting tired of the assumption that newer is better. Sorry to say this but given that the industry is fashion driven and people enjoy reinventing the wheel, newer tools usually offer a small subset of functionality.
Wait really? I was under the assumption that VS Code and Atom were the popular ones for go dev
Not to mention vim with vim-go - heck, there’s even a vim channel on the Gophers Slack community.
I have a feeling Rob Pike is using acme though… (without syntax highlighting!)