Re: Emacs learning curve

[Eric M. Ludlam]

On 07/13/2010 04:10 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> <address@hidden>  writes:
>
> > I disagree that Emacs is actively trying to work against certain classes
> > of users, as you seem to suggest.
> >
> > Obviously, Emacs has varying degrees of support for different
> > programming languages. Somebody has to provide such support, it does not
> > materialise out of the blue, and as with most free software support
> > follows the interest of the developers.
> >
> > If C# is poorly supported, it simply means that very few dedicated emacs
> > hackers has had the need/motivation/time to provide it. In contrast,
> > Emacs offers some of the best Common Lisp support anywhere, complete
> > with cross-referencing, documentation access, completion and minibuffer
> > argument hints.
>
> The question is why the respective facilities are not part of the
> generic Emacs language support framework.  Support for every language
> has a completely disjoint set of features, keybindings, highlighting,
> and so on of wildly differing quality, design and usability.

I have to agree with David here.  I'd noticed for a long time that every 
mode is a little different.  Different C-c special bindings doing 
similar things, or the same C-c binding doing the different things.

This is something I addressed from the start with CEDET.  Every 
mode-specific configuration fits in the CEDET infrastructure, not at the 
user interaction level.  Parsers, project support, template support, etc 
can be provided for a language without consideration for how it might be 
used.  The results are managed by the CEDET infrastructure, and tools 
built on top of that infrastructure will work for every language with 
support the same way.  ECB is a great example of this language 
homogenization at work on a complex and very cool app.

Getting the suite of tools in CEDET to do this wasn't that hard, but did 
take time.  Finding tools I liked, figuring out the commonality between 
languages, and trying to make it "easy" to add language support was the 
first step, and there are lots of tools out there to start from.  Many 
other "ui" like tools do the same.  Anything and predictive come to mind.

I don't want to claim that CEDET is the best thing going, but I do think 
that building up infrastructure for languages to add specialty support 
is what will make having consistent language support more likely, and 
thus make Emacs easier to learn for all languages.

Eric
Eric