it's nice to see an article that says "X isn't for everyone" in the field of text editors.
While the author talked about emacs being "painful" to learn, they later rephrased in terms of a time investment. But I don't think it's just about a time investment. Some people find the process of learning new key bindings, workflows, etc. more painful than others.
I notice that every single person on my ~5 person team uses Eclipse, instead of Emacs or Vim. That's probably partly due to the influence team members have on each other. But I think it's also because we chose (or were assigned) this team based on certain personality traits. The team's product is focussed on making certain hard to use things easier to user. I think that the people who could relate to this product, are the sort of people who experienced the "pain" of learning things like emacs more than others.
I think that we need to acknowledge that people are different. We should value the people who are capable of learning things like emacs with little psychological difficulty. But those of us who like things to be easy and intuitive from the start, should use our visceral experience or hard to use products, to guide us in making easier to user products for others.
While the author talked about emacs being "painful" to learn, they later rephrased in terms of a time investment. But I don't think it's just about a time investment. Some people find the process of learning new key bindings, workflows, etc. more painful than others.
I notice that every single person on my ~5 person team uses Eclipse, instead of Emacs or Vim. That's probably partly due to the influence team members have on each other. But I think it's also because we chose (or were assigned) this team based on certain personality traits. The team's product is focussed on making certain hard to use things easier to user. I think that the people who could relate to this product, are the sort of people who experienced the "pain" of learning things like emacs more than others.
I think that we need to acknowledge that people are different. We should value the people who are capable of learning things like emacs with little psychological difficulty. But those of us who like things to be easy and intuitive from the start, should use our visceral experience or hard to use products, to guide us in making easier to user products for others.