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Comment by etfb | Hacker News Reader

I'm a recovering Emacser, happy enough with less powerful but more modern text editors. It wasn't the program or the UI that finally did me in, but the community: I had a problem with how Emacs worked, I wanted to figure out a solution, so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse. I realised there's something about Emacs that attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smug, self-absorbed and utterly without empathy. Did I want to be one of them? No, I did not. Did I want to have to rely on them for help in my work and play? No, I did not. So I found a text editor that has sufficient extensibility and I installed that, and uninstalled all the emacsen on all my machines. And I felt a lot better afterward.

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Well, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie had to go somewhere and what place would be better for them than Emacs? ;)

Actually I had exactly the same feeling when I started using Emacs: the very first thread on some newsgroup I remember reading was about moving lines up and down, like in sublime(?) with M-S-<up>/<down>. The poor guy who dared to ask was immediately told that this is "not the emacs way", that there are many better ways to do this and so on. Ofc, halfway through the thread I found working code which implemented this feature, but the impression it made was not very good.

But Emacs architecture and it's consequences, like extensibility and customizability, and giant heaps of free, working code are enough for me to just ignore people like this. Or rather to ignore most Emacs related discussions. It's good that Emacs makes it easy to just stay away from other people: all the docs, and the source, are there in the editor itself, so if you don't mind spending a bit of time you can figure anything on your own. Which is what I do and what I like doing.

But I certainly do understand your feelings in this matter and think they are justified.

Amusingly, I asked that same question on SO, and got a couple very polite suggestions within hours.

You sure seem bitter about something. Every time I've visited #emacs for help I have left with my problems resolved.

And because of that, the Emacs community lost yet another potentially helpful member[0]. This here is an example of how toxic communities are formed. Once you reach a critical mass of abusive members, the community can only grow more toxic over time.

[0] I'm going to go ahead and assume that you aren't a smug, self-absorbed sociopath.

Well, not self-absorbed.

Er, I drop in on #emacs regularly, and people there are generally very nice, nothing like you describe.

Maybe you tried at the wrong moment and happened to get the attention of the rare jerk or two, or maybe you were doing something that managed to annoy people (you sometimes see people asking questions in very overbearing and demanding manner ... "Give me the answer now!!" etc).

Indeed, I'd say #emacs is actually a lot better than typical tech channels / mailing lists etc, and the stereotypical techy "attitude" is largely absent there. If anything the biggest problem with it is not attitude, it's that 95% of the discussion on #emacs is not about Emacs (it's kinda ... laid back), and your question might get lost in the noise...

They probably tried to make a common point: do not give the solution. For a given specific issue, the most you should give is pointers.

For the function that solves your problem saves the day but knowing how to find any when needed solves a lifetime of problems. Pointers help to put you on the right track so you're not discouraged.

I was asking all the right questions -- is this possible, what hooks should I consider, what should I take into account to make sure that the stuff I add doesn't stamp all over other stuff. I'm a programmer with thirty years experience and twenty years with Emacs; I know this stuff.

Basically, they shut me down. The thing I was asking was contrary to the whole philosophy of Emacs. I had, they assured me, no right to ask it. I was an idiot for having the problem that I was seeking to solve. And nobody, they told me, had ever had the problem ever in all of history.

Were they right? Well, no, not even slightly. They were horribly, evilly wrong. But even if they had been right, their response was wrong. Their argument was "if you have this problem that can be fixed by a change to Emacs, change yourself". This, in the most extensible editor on the planet. It was like being told that my car's tendency to pull sharply to the left when passing another car was normal and expected and I should take care not to pass other cars.

Unfortunately there are a lot of communities like that, particularly the older ones.

I'm an #emacs regular. Were you the one asking about the mouse in Emacs?

That's the kind of answer that I hate the most. It's basically "you can't and more importantly you shouldn't want that" If you don't know what kind is that just ask how to make PostgreSQL COUNTs as fast as MySQL ones. Conversly I love people who when someone asks them how to shoot himself in the head with a rifle carefully caution what a bullet does to a head but only after explaining how one could actually perform this trick.

You used Emacs for 20 years and one bad interaction on IRC which caused you throw away all that acquired knowledge, let alone elisp you wrote?

The camel was rather overloaded with straw by that stage. I had asked the question two or three times over a long period, and received approximately the same response each time.

I didn't just develop my contempt for the community all in one go. I had to WORK at it!

What was it you wanted to do? I'm not an Emacs internals expert, but you've got me curious :-)

A cynic's TL;DR:

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. And if you really hate the man, get RMS to design him a fishing rod.

Build a man a fire, he's warm for an evening. Set a man on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life. :-)

Appropriately, I think that was Terry Pratchett

it was :) from "jingo", to be precise

I don't know. For a given specific issue, I've actually found the solution pretty helpful!

And pointers can be given at the same time; there's no reason why an answer can't include both, as is most usually practical. It's fun to play the role of delphic oracle, but only as a joke that all concerned are in on, as it's terribly frustrating to be on the receiving end of it.

> so I asked on #emacs on Freenode and got nothing but abuse.

I checked my logs. It was one guy that was abusive. Everyone else was friendly and helpful.

So you doom the whole Emacs community because of one user on #emacs the one time you were there?

> attracts the sort of users I don't want to associate with: people who are smug, self-absorbed and utterly without empathy.

I think you have just described the normal IRC experience for any software project in existence. IRC just tend to breed cliques and inside jokes, and the most common form of reply I have ever gotten while looking for help is "check the source code". Never mind that its a few thousands line of low level C, magic numbers and possible some assembler instructions.

My experience is otherwise. I've found the IRC groups for Python and PHP to be quite friendly. The one for Wordpress suffers a bit from "I don't know you, so I presume you're an idiot" but not to the same degree as the Emacs or Lisp ones. I think there's some interaction between IRC and Lisp that causes this sort of sociopathic behaviour in a small but loud subset of the community -- and the rest don't do enough to discourage it, which makes them all complicit.

I think you are exxagerating, some places tend to become like that and some don't.

I found the python, ruby and perl channels very nice when I was learning the languages a decade ago or so, and by my occasional lurking they still seem to be.

Recently I was on #elm on freenode and it also was a nice place.

Cliques and inside jokes obviously are part of what a community _is_ but that doesn't necessarily translate to smugness and lack of empathy.

The example you think was exaggeration was when someone told me to check a recent patch for the answer, and the patch was several thousand line of low level C. Worse case, sure, but an actually thing that did happen.

I have used the python django IRC channel when developing some sites, and "check the source" has been the most common answer when I run into walls. Usefully, the questions I make receives some basic "see if the documentation say something" which I had of course already done, and then after a few hours of silence, someone says "check the source". This was a 3-4 years ago so maybe it has been improved?

It is true that I don't go to an IRC channel except when documentation and extensive testing has failed to produce an answer. Maybe the smugness and lack of empathy is more a product of asking questions that are not easily answered?

sorry, I didn't mean that "UTSL" isn't a realistic answer, I meant that is not the normal irc experience for all existing software projects.

Weird experience you had there. I have been to many IRC channels on Freenode and found pretty much all of them abusive and unfriendly with the big exception being #emacs, where people seem to be more open and tolerant, also very helpful.

I would say you had bad luck and met an ass (which could happen as anyone can go to #emacs and rant around)

Stackoverflow is a good place to get fast answers to emacs questions. By the way I use IDE's like PHP Storm, Intelli-J and Eclipse in conjunction with emacs. Switching between the two depending on the task. Sorry you decided emacs wasn't for you but it doesn't have to be an either/or. Use the best tool for the job at hand.

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