Makefiles are an acceptable barrier to entry. I've lost a lot of hair trying to figure out how to build huge Java projects that the developers just built inside their five-major-versions-old IDE. ("Oh, just build it by clicking the 'export to WAR' button and then copy the file to each production server." No.)
Considering how trivial it is to write an ant file to do the same thing, it's appalling that the IDEs don't just do this by default. How can you write a good application if you don't even know how to compile it?
But the biggest problem with Emacs is the "project management" functionality. Pick up many modern editors, and you can, with one command, point to a directory and have a project tree, a "jump to file", etc, all built for you.
Of course, Emacs' version is a lot more flexible. The user can hook it, so he gets a fresh project REPL the first time he visits a new project. Or, he can hook the eproject-after-save hook, and commit the changes to a "backup" git branch, so that he never has to worry about not being able to undo.
The idea behind Emacs is that it can do things that nobody else has ever done before, and it continually lives up to this expectation.
(Also, "this is too hard for beginners". OK. Then how did I learn Emacs?)
Considering how trivial it is to write an ant file to do the same thing, it's appalling that the IDEs don't just do this by default. How can you write a good application if you don't even know how to compile it?
But the biggest problem with Emacs is the "project management" functionality. Pick up many modern editors, and you can, with one command, point to a directory and have a project tree, a "jump to file", etc, all built for you.
Emacs does this too: http://github.com/jrockway/eproject.
Of course, Emacs' version is a lot more flexible. The user can hook it, so he gets a fresh project REPL the first time he visits a new project. Or, he can hook the eproject-after-save hook, and commit the changes to a "backup" git branch, so that he never has to worry about not being able to undo.
The idea behind Emacs is that it can do things that nobody else has ever done before, and it continually lives up to this expectation.
(Also, "this is too hard for beginners". OK. Then how did I learn Emacs?)