Re: Suggested experimental test

[Jean Louis]

* Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> [2021-03-23 20:53]:
> IMO Emacs should aim at being fully usable, including all its
> extensions, without ever having to edit configuration files manually
> (and without restarting Emacs).

>From that specific view point how you think Emacs should work that
users ever edit configuration file manually, I do understand it. It
would increase the usability of Emacs by beginners, but it would hide
the configuration file which is program and software that users
create. We have got butterfly effect in Emacs from where you and other
people came to improve Emacs and created many other software.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Because Emacs was never Android with "click and play" features, it
created so many programmers. Because it is programmable Editor it
helped many programmers to extend Emacs.

Would we have all the features in Emacs by the system "Click and Play"
very easy to go -- we would have less people collaborating on creating
free software and also software extending Emacs. 

We can see that in example on Android devices where users are
clueless, totally clueless that they can change, modify, create some
software. They are not told so, they are shaped as consumers, used,
who use applications and considered as number, not human, without any
collaboration or participation in software. They have no idea what is
Android, how it runs, how could they contribute, not even file bugs,
few free software repositories help on that like F-Droid -- but from
beginners' view point, software is too usable, but users may not even
be aware that it is software, as all what they did is "click and
play". It shaped our society to have largest number of computer users
ever, also the largest number of programmers, but it made the worse
ever ratio of number of programmers to number of computers!

Emacs such as it is, is raising the number of programmers to the
number of computers, as it gives incentives to users, incidentally or
planned, to evaluate things, to work with other software, to configure
this and that, and that is how programmers evolve.

I would not be thus changing Emacs into situation where use is not
supposed to think and create, as that situation we already have with
Android and society of computer users who do not even know they are
computer users.

>From the general view point of Emacs usability for beginners,
beginners use arrows, they move cursor, use mouse, insert letters,
symbols and numbers, open and save files. Emacs is thus very user
friendly. I was beginner, we all were beginners, was it difficult to
open and save files, write files? It was never difficult to me.

> Major and minor mode packages can define keys that work out of the box in
> buffers in which these modes are enabled.  I suppose everyone would agree
> that asking users who install a foo-mode package to add
> 
> (define-key foo-mode-map (kbd "<some key>") #'foo-mode-do-something)
> 
> lines in their init configuration file (and to restart Emacs) before being
> able to use foo-mode would be cumbersome.

I am sure it may look cumbersome, but user installing it is not a
beginner. If it is beginner, one will start looking into function
definition, it is incitement to learn programming, and yields with new
Emacs contributors and programmers making extensions for software.

By hiding configurations, we would limit evolvement of number of
programmers in future.

One other good example of people becoming programmers by casual
incitement is the scratch buffer. Removing it, would make less
programmers. Providing scratch buffers in various languages, would
make more programmers.

Jean