[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Nix]

On 15 May 2009, general outgrape:
> Nix wrote:
>>                 (I tried Eclipse the other day. I couldn't extend the
>> editor on the fly or fix niggles in its behaviour! You have to 'load
>> plugins' written in some horrible halfwitted procedural language plainly
>> unsuited to interactive use, 'Java' or something.)
>>   
> Yeah Java can be like pulling teeth but it's massively powerful and
> flexible, which I gather has always been Emacs USP right? The prevailing

It's got Java, but Java is *not a scripting language*: writing little
things requires writing an awful lot of boilerplate first, and then you
have a manual compilation step (though I suppose the editor could do
that for you). I'd say it's poorly suited as an extension language to an
interactive system.

> attitude here seems to be "don't be a wuss" when faced with learning
> curves like the white cliffs of Dover so "it took me a whole day and it
> still didn't work" wouldn't seem to be a good defence ;-) As with Emacs,
> Eclipse's default configuration is rubbish,

Nice to know Emacs isn't the only one to have this problem. Emacs has a
good excuse though: many of its defaults haven't changed since the early
80s because if they changed the change would annoy existing users.
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