Thread by @MarcoCraveiro

1/ Another Friday, another Emacs thread. So, you've seen me ranting and raving about Emacs, and by now you may be asking: "So, are you telling me I should abandon X and use Emacs?" Sadly, the answer is almost always... "no, don't do that". But let me try to explain why.

2/ If you are a new-ish dev, you should try to optimise for two things simultaneously: a) things you find interesting *and* b) things that will make you employable. Therefore, you should use whatever environment and languages employers want. Sadly, that won't be Emacs (or Vim).

3/ Experienced devs end up converging to a productive workflow, adapted to a myriad of languages. In my 20 or so years of dev, I faced C, C++, VB, C#, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Powershell, Bash, Python... Far too many languages to recount. Each had a preferred corporate dev environment

4/ The experienced dev develops over time an ability to adapt to the vagaries of customer setups - Eclipse, far too many Visual Studios to recount, VS Code, and so on - and be reasonably productive. So therefore, since no customer is using Emacs, there is no need to adapt to it.

5/ So why would you learn an editor like Emacs? Its hard to justify these days, particularly because Lisp is not in fashion as it once was. In a way, this is similar to how things were when I started to use Linux over 20 years ago. In those days very few people were using Linux.

6/ As a new dev I faced the exact same dilemma new devs face today: I could (and did) learn Windows and become employable, and not have that much fun, or I could learn Linux and have lots of fun but nothing to show on my CV. I chose the later. It was hard going but lots of fun.

7/ Whilst it took me _at least_ a year to get my PC to boot in graphical mode - these were the times when you'd get easily working on Windows 95/98 - by the time I was finished I understood how a kernel worked, how drivers worked, how XFree (in those days) worked and so on.

8/ None of this seemed remotely useful at the time, but it was immense fun. And because the internet was not what it is today, you had almost no one to talk about -other than the local nerds. However, fast forward some 5 years and suddenly those skills made you very employable.

9/ There was a saying that went along the lines of "Free Software is only free if your time is worth nothing" and I get this often quoted whenever I mention Linux and Emacs. Not so much Linux these days but definitely Emacs. And it is true; if you have a business, time is money.

10/ The flip side of this argument is that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a bit like a long term investment; it does not pay dividends straight away but it, very slowly, accrues. If you are in the thick of it, you will learn deep and unchanging truths about software.

11/ These truths will serve you in good stead for the rest of your developing life; but in order to learn them, you need to be able to afford to make the investment in the first place, and very few of us are that lucky. We need to learn something of practical use now, not later.

12/ This is why most will learn C# and Kotlin, not Lisp or Haskell; VS Code and Atom, not Emacs or Vim. Most of us cannot fight against the forcing function that is the market. But if you are lucky enough to be able to afford to be off the beaten track, the rewards can be great.

@threadreaderapp unroll