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From: z@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: EMACS Usage
Message-ID: <6027@cca.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-Nov-83 12:41:38 EST
Article-I.D.: cca.6027
Posted: Wed Nov  2 12:41:38 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Nov-83 05:30:37 EST
References: <6010@cca.UUCP> kobold.190
Lines: 50

Tom Teixeira says "Most people will use the editor that is best
supported."  I fully agree.  However, the implication is that
significantly more effort is put into supporting CCA EMACS at CCA than
is put into supporting other editors.  This is not the case.  Very
little active support is put into any of the editors in terms of helping
users on a one-to-one basis.  Instead, it is the support that comes with
the editor that is important.  Both the Rand editor and vi come with
reasonable documentation, which is one reason they both developed a fair
following.  As CCA EMACS is a much more complex editor than either of
those two, its documentation is correspondingly more extensive,
including a 235 page manual, an online tutorial that assumes no previous
knowledge of text editors, and many other online help facilities.
Certainly this type of support was instrumental in the acceptance of CCA
EMACS here.  Without it, there would have been no way that CCA EMACS
could have been introduced as the standard editor for secretaries,
managers, and our text editing department.  We do not have the
programming support to offer a lot of interactive help to these users,
and these people typically do not like to have to look through source
code to figure out how a a certain feature works.

Correspondingly, the lack of this level of documentation was certainly
one reason why Gosling's Emacs never caught on here.  I have a copy of
his manual; several users even borrowed it to look at, but none began
using his Emacs as a result.  When Unipress announced with great
fanfare that they were marketing Gosling's Emacs, and word got out that
they were planning to do a real manual, I sent away $30 to see what the
new version was like.  I was quite surprised to find that the manual was
just a slightly updated version of the Xeroxed sheets I had, now put
into a three ring binder.  In addition to finding the already noted
spelling and grammatical errors, I was struck by the incompleteness of
the manual.  For example, the entire contents of section 19.2, entitled
"Electric-lisp-mode -- Assistance for Lisp programming" is the phrase
"No documentation yet".

Tom is also correct when he mentions the phenomenon whereby people tend
to stick with the editor they learn first.  This is undoubtedly another
reason why we have no users of Gosling's Emacs here.  But at the same
time, the fact that most users of other editors at CCA have switched to
CCA EMACS seems to indicate that this resistance can be overcome when
the difference between editors is great enough.

Of course, there are many technical reasons why people at CCA prefer CCA
EMACS to Gosling's.  However, I must agree with Tom's comment that people
are more fanatical about editors than religion.  (How many people here
remember the 1980 Usenix conference in Deleware where Dave Yost started
his talk on the Rand editor with the statement "Friends, be saved!")
So, I think I had better stop here before I ignite too many flames.

	Steve Zimmerman
	{decvax,linus}!cca!z