I don't think emacs is "user-hostile" on purpose. You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing.
Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions -- for better or worse, emacs does not work like other popular software today.
Calling this "user-hostile" comes off somewhat entitled. Emacs developers in the 70s/80s/90s/00s simply didn't know enough about today's users to cater to us, even if they wanted to. That's hardly their fault.
So, todays way and the emacs way have diverged some, and it does take a bit of effort to learn. Not because emacs hates you! But because emacs is ancient. The (objective, non-stockholm-syndrome) reward for your efforts to understand it are a) mastery of a system useful enough to survive this long, and b) mastery of a system that isn't likely to change out from under you.
> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing.
We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence.
GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're including reimplementations then obviously Unix itself, which is used by many of us every day, it older. And if you start counting from 1984...that's not especially old.
I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).
Just because something is old doesn't make it not user hostile. If anything it encourages it as we are always getting better at making better interfaces.
Cars from the 70's don't have airbags. So, by comparison to what is available today, they are user hostile.
Hm. I take your point, but I'm not sure the analogy works.
Maybe better: "Old" (pick a date) cars had a manual transmission. Compared to automatic transmissions, you might consider that user hostile. But back then no one knew what they were missing and got along just fine.
Nowadays, some people still like manual transmissions! Not everyone, but some folks still buy them. Some even claim they're better than automatics! "They're cheaper, easier to maintain!" Are they user-hostile? I guess it depends on who the user is.
(Airbags seem like a strict improvement, sure. But part of that comes from them not being part of the "interface" of the car -- we don't interact with them, we don't form preferences about them, gain familiarity with them, etc. Perhaps they correspond better to multi-cored CPUs, multithreading, or high-res color displays (features emacs has kept with the times on, more or less). It's much harder to come up with similar strict improvements in the UI world.)
I seem to recall reading that the keyboards that emacs was originally developed for had the CTRL key in the middle left (where the modern, useless, "caps lock" key is). The awkwardness of the CTRL key on modern keyboards makes emacs seem unnecessarily user-hostile as well, but that's also not something that Stallman could reasonably have predicted.
Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions -- for better or worse, emacs does not work like other popular software today.
Calling this "user-hostile" comes off somewhat entitled. Emacs developers in the 70s/80s/90s/00s simply didn't know enough about today's users to cater to us, even if they wanted to. That's hardly their fault.
So, todays way and the emacs way have diverged some, and it does take a bit of effort to learn. Not because emacs hates you! But because emacs is ancient. The (objective, non-stockholm-syndrome) reward for your efforts to understand it are a) mastery of a system useful enough to survive this long, and b) mastery of a system that isn't likely to change out from under you.