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Message from discussion Issues with emacs (was Emacs users a dying breed?)
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Ludwig, Mark  
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 More options Jun 25 2012, 3:23 pm
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
From: "Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.m...@siemens.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:23:19 +0000
Local: Mon, Jun 25 2012 3:23 pm
Subject: RE: Issues with emacs (was Emacs users a dying breed?)
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> From: Eric Abrahamsen
> Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 6:38 AM
> To: help-gnu-em...@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Issues with emacs (was Emacs users a dying breed?)

> On Sun, Jun 24 2012, Tom wrote:

> > Bastien <bzg <at> gnu.org> writes:

> >> The good news is that, whether Emacs users are a dying breed
> >> or not, the only remedy to this hypothetical issue is to have
> >> more Emacs developers.

> > But how to have more developers. I see 3 possibilites:

> > 1. Motivate more users to be volunteer developers? Any idea how
> > to do that?

> One possibility: if a pure-Lisp implementation of Emacs became the
> "main" implementation, I wonder if many Elisp-gurus who aren't
> particularly enthusiastic about C programming would be encouraged to
> expand their hacking into the Emacs basics.

> If the line between programming Emacs packages and programming Emacs
> guts were blurred or erased altogether, I'll bet you'd get a lot more
> people able and willing to contribute work on fundamentals like the
> display engine or multi-threading.

Perhaps in the abstract this is a good idea, but it's not at all clear to me that you want a bigger crowd of people working on either of those two areas, in particular.  They're very tender areas, and it's likely that a worker needs a lot of context in order to successfully modify these things.  Learning the context takes time and I believe our do-everything-faster culture does not particularly reward the slow learning processes necessary in order to learn complex programming contexts such as these.  Some of the context comes from bug reports.

(IMHO, in general, far too many people attempt to write or modify multi-threading code than are actually competent to do so.  The hardware and software complexities involved in getting robust memory ordering across processors with good performance are simply beyond the average programmer....)

Cheers,

Mark

Ob.Help:


 
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