(2008-04-28) Yegge Emacs Future

Steve Yegge thinks EMacs has to evolve to survive. He thinks that GUI IDE-s lack the self-hosting/reflexive property to make a good Platform/EcoSystem, so he doesn't think they're the primary competition. IDEs are draining users away, but it's not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It's the browsers (Web Browser). They have all the power of a Fat Client Platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that FireFox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox. Each has what the other lacks, and together they're pretty damn close to the ultimate software package... Emacs has to compete or die. If Firefox ever "tips" and achieves even a tenth of the out-of-the-box editing power of Emacs, not just for a specific application but for all web pages, widgets, text fields and system resources, Emacs is going to be toast. So he says EMacs needs to become a browser, need a new rendering engine, multi-language support, and ConCurrency support. And he thinks XEmacs, as a now-inferior fork (on the never-ReBoot criteria of 2007-01-20-YeggeGreatSoftwareSystems) should give up and merge back into GnuEmacs.

Or is he just preparing to move us to his NBE? 2007-02-14-YeggeNextBigLanguage

Mar'2009: Mozilla competition: 2009-03-05-MozillaBespin