Emacs for Blubs

I was reading Dive into Python, and the author strongly recommended emacs. I have heard this recommendation several times before: the first from Science Fiction author Neal Stephenson, and again a bit later from Stevey Yegge. So, for the umpteenth time, I am trying out this editor.

In my earliest attempts, I started with the tutorial, and I had never gotten completely through it. My brain holds very few facts at a time, and learning control keys to move around in the text maxed me out right away. This time, I am trying a book: Ralph Roberts's Unix® Desktop Guide to Emacs (1992 — and yes, the trademark symbol is in the title). For some reason, while using the book I was able to get through the entire tutorial. Go figure.

As I get deeper and deeper into the mysteries of emacs, I am reminded of a crack about BBedit by Rands:

BBEdit's biggest flaw is one of its greatest assets: its history. BBEdit's design is an amalgam of every design decision the Bare Bones Software team has made since its release for System Software 6 in the early 90s and it shows.

Emacs may be the best text editor in the world (all the cool kids say so), but its learning curve is pretty steep and its features (look! you can embed lisp macros right in there!) assume you are already one of the cool kids instead of one of the Blubs.

So as a Blub, I am never going to pick up emacs. The kind of power it gives me is way too high up the abstraction ladder. As a Blub, I want something that can immediately make me feel like I am adding value to the business process and/or satisfying my customer's needs, and this editor is asking me to focus on the tool rather than the problem. It doesn't matter that learning the tool will make me more productive as a programmer and thus be in a better position to solve my clients' problems. I wouldn't be a Blub programmer if that argument carried any weight.

So I will probably by staying with the python plug-in for eclipse for learning python. Sure, Eclipse imposes its own learning curve, but I have already been through the first stages of it, so I don't really have to deal with much newness.

>>Edit
Stevey has just verified my Blub attitude towards emacs:

Emacs offers a completely hostile end-user [end-user programmer] experience and a nearly unparalleled programmer experience [programmer-user].

So for those of you who want to program and add hooks to your editor, emacs rocks. For those of us who want the tool to be ready to use to solve non-editor programming problems, perhaps it is not the best.