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The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

karl-voit.at

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Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#11

Post by 908B64B197 »

anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

> But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away.

For LaTeX a large part of the appeal is to get a template and be able to respect whatever arbitrary formatting requirements.

Someone could build a layer on top of existing LaTeX to add a more modern language on top of it and have it expand to LaTeX.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#12

Post by grae_QED »

anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

Why redo something if it works? People are still using Fortran because it works well for certain applications. Just because its old doesn't mean its outdated.

I could even argue that since Emacs hasn't been phased out (and still has a decent user base) that it does something that other text editors don't (or can't) do.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#13

Post by lgrapenthin »

I am also a 10+ year GNU Emacs user. I haven't customized it beyond font size and a few settings. I even use the default theme. Other users seem to go crazy and try to make it into a spaceship. Then they claim that it takes a lot of time to customize it. It mainly is very different to operate from all programs and window managers that we are used to these days, and people perceive this as a wrong and try to "fix" it with confusing "starter packs". In reality, its meta features and comprehensive reference documentation make it a closed environment that is very pleasant to navigate.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#14

Post by cpach »

CalChris wrote: post #4
anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…

Just out of curiosity, which editor do you use? Overleaf?

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#15

Post by User23 »

CalChris wrote: post #4
anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…

Imagine a carpenter saying, "I don't want to master my tools, I just want to build things."

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#16

Post by itronitron »

I think the lock-in effect is driven by a desire to retain (and easily access) memory of prior experiences (emails sent, bugs fixed, etc.) and not based on 'investment made'

The sunk-cost fallacy doesn't really apply here because the time spent using emacs in the future would be spent on any tool that was chosen instead.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#17

Post by cpach »

lgrapenthin wrote: post #13

I am also a 10+ year GNU Emacs user. I haven't customized it beyond font size and a few settings. I even use the default theme. Other users seem to go crazy and try to make it into a spaceship. Then they claim that it takes a lot of time to customize it. It mainly is very different to operate from all programs and window managers that we are used to these days, and people perceive this as a wrong and try to "fix" it…

I agree – Plain Emacs works very well. My current ~/.emacs is 27 lines (comments included).

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#18

Post by pkulak »

So, that's NOT the sunk cost fallacy. If you are still getting benefit from the cost, it's not sunk*. This is just not wanting to invest time into a new system while you're still productive in the current system.

A sunk cost would be like, "Well, I spent $100 on this steak, so I'm going to finish it, even though the next bite may make me vomit." In that case, you paid for the steak, it cannot be returned half eaten, and eating more of it will bring you zero benefit, so the rational behavior is to not eat more of it.

EDIT: It's not a "fallacy". It is still a sunk cost. My mistake.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#19

Post by blacktriangle »

playcache wrote: post #8

This is why I don't bother with emacs, I just don't have the time to sink in the first place. Now that I have a young family and hobbies outside of work, I don't have the time to spend hours fixing and tinkering a setup or learning an already opinionated set up like spacemacs etc. I just use an IDE which is already set up with good defaults and I have a well settled vim config for driving remote machines or changing…

Emacs gives you back what you put into it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using it at a very basic level, and getting to that point takes minimal time. There's a 15 minute interactive tutorial linked from the start screen at which point you're fully able to get work done. You can then reach for other goodies like Org, Magit, various interactive shells, tetris, whenever you want/need. I probably used Emacs for 5 years straight before installing a single package other than color themes.

To me the pitch for Emacs is it's the same overall platform now as it has been for decades and will probably continue to be. While all my colleagues were jumping from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime to Atom and now VSCode, I've just been sitting here editing text.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#20

Post by sumtechguy »

zibzab wrote: post #3

Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…

I used to customize pretty much all of my tools and OSs like that. If there was a control/config for it I was tweaking it. Now I leave them alone. I jump between so many boxes now it is not worth it. Except for 'hide file extensions' I tweak that one every time :)
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