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Comment by jibal | Hacker News Reader

Young people and beginners don't even know these things exist, and if they do happen to know they exist they have no reason to look into them. It's absurd to attack people for not "attempting to understand" something that they don't know enough about to have reason to "attempt" it. There are all sorts of technologies that I haven't "attempted to understand" (including many emacs packages) because they aren't on my radar or I haven't been made aware of their value. This lack of an attempt is not some sort of flaw.

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I'm not trying to attack or blame anyone, but rather share my empirical observations. "Young people and beginners don't even know these things exist" is also along the same lines of thought.

> This lack of an attempt is not some sort of flaw."

It could be, but perhaps on the other end here — maybe the evangelism and elucidation are at fault? Seasoned adepts often forget "the beginner's journey" and can't break through the "communication disconnect". It's hard to explain the "what" and "how" without effectively conveying the "why", especially when the other side is not interested in hearing the "why".

I'm just sad that a lot of very talented folk either choose to ignore or deliberately dismiss some great ideas, building their assumptions based on some shorts they watch on YouTube or TikTok.

The lack of attempt may not be a flaw, but maybe "the lack of attention" is our generational flaw? Maybe while I'm focused on Emacs and Lisp, I'm failing to see a bigger picture, where tons of other pragmatic ideas get dumped overboard because they don't align with the prevailing narrative?

I think it is way simpler than that. IMHO, for many people young or old the value proposition of emacs simple is no longer there and/or worth the huge learning curve. For most things people would use something like emacs the alternatives are simple good enough and some cases better. By better I mean mostly more accessible, less complex and with a better ecosystem. One tool that does all, also simply does not resonate with everyone nor do many people feel the need to make their almost their lifestyle (not saying you do, I'm speaking in general to the Emacs runs my life folks). Another thing to consider often is that when working in a group or team at work for example it can be the easiest path forward to use the tool the company officially uses and your teammates do. If your team uses for example slack to communicate why go through the hassle of setting up some most likely cumbersome workaround to target it via emacs instead of just using the slack.

My team does use Slack app and I use it too. The point is not to do "everything in Emacs" because you love that so much. The point is that when plain text is the main medium (and for majority of tasks we deal with daily, it is), then using text-oriented tools can give you certain edge.

When communicating over Slack my colleagues would send me a ticket number in Jira or a link to some code snippet on GH. When I have to share the same (or similar) stuff — I can easily provide the exact link to the ticket, with its description, I can quickly retrieve some relevant data from that ticket, if I'm adding some notes. When I'm sharing a link to a code snippet, I can easily retrieve the fully-qualified namespace and the name of the function, so the url is not some arbitrary incantation that my teammates have to guess about before clicking on it — it contains the exact piece of information they may like to see even before opening it.

When someone shares 'some incantation' with me, I don't even hesitate — I delegate the task to Emacs, and it is smart enough to recognize that a piece of plain text like "XYZ-146" is a Jira ticket, that "RFC-6364" is a document, that a github url is a link to a PR — with a single keystroke I can browse the jira ticket, read RFC document, explore the changes in the PR. I can invoke an LLM on the spot to summarize the points of the RFC document, to give me some insight to add a comment to the PR review.

All that without a hassle, all that done with simple keystrokes, all in one place. I can easily copy relevant information into my notes, I can grab stuff from my notes and share with my colleagues, easily converting Org-mode markup into Markdown without even blinking. The flow is there. And that flow also contributes to the general well-being of my teammates. I can assure you, they are happier with me using Emacs, even though most of them don't even know anything about it.

> the value proposition of emacs simple is no longer there

My main point from the get-go was that most people don’t even realize what a ‘value proposition’ there is.

All fair. I suppose my point is that I think people do actually have a decent sense of what value proposition there with emacs but simply don't agree that its strengths are worth the steep climb and or a the much better that their current tool needs replacing.

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