> And there are already numerous tools which you have to learn for an efficient workflow, like build and testing tools, code repositories, etc.
emacs already has interfaces to build and testing tools. It has Magit, the best git interface I've used.
> Remember software has always been about raising productivity, not just of an industry but of the developer himself.
That's why I'm advocating a user-extensible editing environment! That's why I use emacs.
> Eventually we'll look back on programmers using text editors and rsync for development and deployment the same way we look at people developing software in Pascal and BASIC.
We emacs users already look at folks using editors and rsync for development that way: we have TRAMP (https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/), which enables one to run an editor locally on remote files. One can even run commands on the server a remote file is located on.
There's no reason that elisp can't be written to spin up DigitalOcean droplets, AWS EC2 instances, fire off Lambda code, deploy pods to kubernetes, control a Mesos cluster, &c. &c. &c. And if one does that, one gets all that plus a world-class, best-of-breed text editing environment with millions of lines of code to do just about anything else one might want to do already written.
Or one could spend time trying to extend a proprietary product, running elsewhere, ignoring forty years of experience and improvements. One could try to reinvent the wooden wheel while others are running transcontinental airline service.
That's really how I feel: every day I'm taking a teleporter to the office, and meanwhile I'm watching others talk about how they've noticed that if they rub a pair of sticks together they get pretty warm. I'm not saying that the folks busily reinventing fire are dumb — most definitely not: they're brilliant — but rather that no-one has bothered teaching them all the innovations which have occurred since fire was first invented.
Setting the metaphor aside, our industry seems to do an amazing job of utterly refusing to learn from and develop on the past. Every half-decade or so someone comes along and reinvents things which were truly groundbreaking ideas before I was born. We seem to be stuck repeating 1970s computer science, over and over and over, rather than trying to live in the 2010s.
