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

Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use. I feel that Emacs Lisp has had a much slower evolution (though admittedly I've only used it for about 20 years, I can't comment on how much it changed prior to that).

In particular, the biggest change I'm aware of with Emacs Lisp (the language) is that we now have lexically scoped variables. The biggest change to its implementation has been a push towards native compilation (much improved performance, I like it). The language has, otherwise, largely remained the same.

In some regard, this can be seen as a consequence of having a decent base language. Where Fortran's original version became increasingly indecent as time went on, Emacs Lisp seems to have held up better thanks to a stronger foundation. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

In particular, the things that (my opinion) are still missing from the language are:

1. A good concurrency model. CSP, actors, I don't care but it needs to exist. Paired with the native execution we're getting now, this would greatly improve the real and perceived performance of the system.

2. A real module system. I'm not talking about a package manager, but moving things into module scopes a la Common Lisp packages. The prefixed names for functions and variables is a hazard. Even if you leave every symbol exported by default so that you don't lose visibility to module internals it would be better than now. It would also open up a lot of opportunities like the potential to run multiple versions of the same package side-by-side.

When I was at Oracle in the 90s, I was constantly having to sit down at someone else's machine (this was before covid, of course). And there were zillions of Unix versions, not just Linux. You couldn't even count on emacs being installed, but I drew the line at learning vi, other than :q! If they'd been editing, I'd ask them to save it.

What that meant is, whatever customizations I had on my own machine were not available. I had to learn to work with the defaults. This is liberating. I recommend it.

I wish there was a solid competitor to Emacs, but the thing that keeps me coming back is that I have the time to tinker with it a lot and the community is great. Vim and Vscode have some valiant maintainers of projects, but from what I've seen it's nothing compared to the big Emacs projects, especially Org mode for which I haven't found a reasonable alternative in Vscode.

However, I don't like fact that most of the editor is a single event loop. This is not a big deal most of the time, but if, say, you're using magit on a large repo and a command finishes and the buffer must refresh, you're gonna wait there for several seconds being unable to do anything else (no switching to other buffers, much less continuing to use Magit while it is updated asynchronously). (btw if I'm wrong about this, for the long of god enlighten me!)

elisp is a bit quirky and dated, and very hard to figure out incrementally. I am still at the place of "copy-paste from other smart people's configs" because I have not really sunk the time to gain a deep understanding of the language; the lack of types and a somewhat tricky (although functional) debugger prevents many of the things about the language from being elucidated, especially because the powerful macros.

However, I don't really know what an effective alternative would be besides perhaps Javascript (which I'm also not a fan of) or Python.

when you are looking for a tool as a programmer, the question you should be asking is not 'is it complex?', the question always is 'is it worth it?'. emacs is the only tool in existence i can confidently say yes, every bit. as a programmer you should be using emacs.

i have used visual-studio for 8 years then vim for at least 5, emacs was always there taunting me. after 'evil' i had no reason to avoid it and i wish someone told me to use it the day when i started coding. this is not vim-vs-emacs, this is not ide-wars, they are for language-lawyers and influencers spewing bullshit for internet points.

magit, tramp, org-mode, evil... every one of them are free, orthogonal to rest of the emacs-system, supported on every os.

but emacs too comes with a curse, just like lisp. after you get used to it, there is no going back. everything is going to feel inferior.

Well, Emacs has some major limitations as an editor, places where it really shows its age. Particularly, it is single threaded and this affects many normal uses - for example, while opening a connection to a remote machine with TRAMP, the whole GUI is completely frozen. Similarly with many development tools, such as magit or the excellent lsp-mode (Language Server Protocol support).