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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

In 20 or 40 years, emacs will still exist, as will the hooks and tools you've integrated and built up to support it.

VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

And I say that as someone who doesn't use Emacs much -- I'd learned it at one point and used it pretty heavily for a job, with a very nice set of modes for a proprietary software tool I was using at the time, but made the critical career error of working for an idiot boss who didn't believe any software other than what the vendor provided was necessary on corporate servers.

So yes, I use vim.

But I've learned ... at least a dozen editors and development environments which are either dead or proprietary and not availa ble to me. Time which I could have devoted to learning persistent tools and extending them.

That's among the strongest arguments in favour of using Free Software tools generally, from a technical PoV. Your knowledge tends to remain relevant far, far longer.

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> VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

VS was first released in 1997; Eclipse in 2001; and IntelliJ in 2001 as well. I wouldn't take that bet.

>In 20 or 40 years, emacs will still exist, as will the hooks and tools you've integrated and built up to support it.

> VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

Why do you think so ?

Intellij and Eclipse are both open source. I suspect they will be around as well. The companies supporting them may go out of business, but there are enough users for it at the moment that someone will be able to keep maintaining it or build new businesses around it.

Emacs is a very general and fundamental tool. It's "do one thing well" is "organise textual interactions, via lisp". And that ranges from editing to shell to numerous programming environments to email to web....

I'm actually thinking of picking up Emacs again as a preferred option to a browser.

Eclipse and Intellij may be open source (and I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with them that I'd blown that fact, thanks for the correction), but they're far narrower in scope. That itself tends to be a strike against. Even broadly-used tools -- say, Perl -- can be, pardon the term, eclipsed by others.

Mind to: learning multiple ways isn't a Bad Thing. But being highly mindful of what tends to survive and what doesn't is itself useful.

Emacs dates from glass TTYs, and has survived to mobile devices. I've seen enough of other tools to note the quirks of their own tech origins and how this has or hasn't limited them over the years.

So: consider mine a somewhat informed, somewhat uninformed opinion. Though I'd still strongly recommend Emacs as a durable, extensible, and exceedingly useful skill.

There is a difference between brand/product name and product itself. As @dredmorbius mentioned in a sibling comment, IDEs by definition do not "do one thing well" - various tools are integrated with varying degrees of tightness. Take old VS project, old Eclipse workspace and they have to be first converted to a new format. How can one be sure that there is 1:1 mapping between old and new formats? Having worked on VS6 does not guarantee that old tips&tricks will be valid in VS2016 or VS2030. Imagine if they decided to switch from VC to clang - it is integral part of VS and cannot be dismissed. Even though I'm not emacs user I'm pretty confident that overwhelming majority of what I learn today about the tool will be valid 20 years later.

Having worked on VS6 does not guarantee that old tips&tricks will be valid in VS2016 or VS2030.

They do if those tips&tricks include basic editing functions, which is what you're talking about if you're comparing it to vi/emacs.

My "tips and tricks" include how to read email and RSS/ATOM feeds in Emacs, which I do using Gnus.

In fact, reading email and RSS/ATOM in Gnus is also a tip/trick, since it was originally written (in 1987) for Usenet.

I'm not at all saying that others should use Emacs for their email. I'm pointing out that Emacs customisation can involve far more than "basic editing functions", and that these customisations can continue working for decades.

Point is, if you use emacs and vi, you're stuck doing basic editing functions in a different way than the rest of the world. We see vi users adapt to this by trying to cram vi plugins into everything, and emacs users by trying to cram everything into emacs.

Not stuck, empowered

After witnessing many of these discussions, it's just FUD. Just because Emacs is older doesn't mean that IntelliJ or Eclipse aren't likely to follow you until retirement. Java hit critical mass a long time ago and both IDEs have mass adoption and are also OSS, as you mentioned.

The POV presented in that comment is basically a sales pitch. It's too standardized and common not to be (it pops up in most of these threads).

There is an interesting rule from biological evolution of rates of extinction with species age that I'd thought of in relation to this. Essentially: they're constant. That is, a species is as likely ro go extinct when old as young: there is no increased survival probability with age.

Leigh Van Valen's Law of Extinction, related to the Red Queen Hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

I don't know how well this translates to areas such as software, but it does give me pause.

Nassim Taleb disagrees with you https://mises.org/library/how-time-and-uncertainty-can-make-...

Eclipse, maybe not. But IntellijIDEA, I doubt that it will stay if Jetbrains goes away. They do not fully open source their IDE.

VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won't.

Well, I hope they won't. But I'm sure their many common UI conventions will. Those conventions are shared between hundreds of thousands of apps already.

In 20 or 40 years, the Emacs UI will still rule only in a single program (and if we're unlucky maybe a few other tools still, like the readline library!).

As for vi, I'm sure some people will still be installing vi plugins everywhere to get 1/10th as smooth an experience as everyone else, and telling themselves they're more productive for it. Already these UI conventions developed for a line editor have outlived much of the generation that has ever used a line editor, so I'm sure it can go on for another 40 years!

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