When you join a new company, is it faster to fix a bug rewriting everything from scratch or to modify what's there? Seriously, get your head out of your ass.
Well, then you didn't do it right. The TV show is garbage, the books were sublime (although like LoTR, their pacing was backloaded, so you had to suffer though the first half of each book. The third book is more uniformly paced).
Children of Time is nothing like Anathem, but both are so, so bad. CoT was good for about a hundred pages, and then I just got sick of spiders berating each other. Quit around the midpoint.
GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. GGP's critique is typical of poor exposition. Read the first chapter of any maths textbook from the 1970s. It doesn't make any sense because the author already knows where everything leads and lest he appear a fool to his peers, will insist the reader does too.
GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.
"Flibbertigibbeting" and "Beboppin" are the new i'm waiting for it to compile, but while the binary outcome of compilation (either it compiles or it doesn't) keeps your head in the game, the open-endedness of a Claude response can be disorienting after you've come back from the YouTube/Reddit wormhole -- like how on Monday you ask yourself wtf you were doing on Friday. But it's just a matter of time before prompting is as fast as Googling... and then it's off to collecting UBI!
You misunderstand. Every mailing list has their healthy share of drive-by contributions, but emacs.devel contains a handful of dudes for whom *all they do* is emacs. We're talking nights, weekends, holidays. If they were indeed working a job, the inordinate time spent on the mailing list would constitute defrauding their employer.
Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages.
This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.