GNU Emacs: Creeping Feautrism is a Strength

I have very little experience with Emacs myself. I've seen a couple of power users at work with it though and I was impressed with the speed they were able to use to produce some pretty interesting results. Unfortunately that same power comes with an expectantly steep learning curve, and that is one reason I never really spent much time with it.

Emacs, judging by this author, seems to exist as some sort of ideal as far as open source community programming goes. It's apparently very easy to make simple extensions to the command structure and to combine those extensions into larger features. The extensions are easy to share and easy to setup for a user's calling preference. All of this is great, but I wonder what cost the people in charge of maintaining the releases have to put in to make sure that they are growing in a meaningful way. I mean, with everyone passing around their packages how do the people in charge hear about them, and how do they make sure they aren't taking in multiples of a given script set when they decide to adopt a package. The amount of overhead to stay on top of these things cannot be small. Additionally, the authors continual decrying of plug-ins for making plug-ins puzzles me. After all, if more recent systems have more complex data models why wouldn't they need this, and other than making freelance additions easy what is gained from a simple data model? And what if developers want to make large changes to the current setup? These plug-ins would be a great tool in helping to start that process.

The discussion about Firefox at the end of the paper is interesting, and I can see the possibility of an Emacs or Emacs like extension to Firefox in the near future (after all, if they can integrate a word processor into a web-page to work as smoothly as this blog publishing software why couldn't someone create a more complex but similar extension). But I see two fundamental issues with this path. One, Firefox is developing in a way to make itself a more efficient and powerful browser, and it will better spend its efforts along this line leaving it to third parties to develop this Emacs like tool. And Two, why would those people seek to build Emacs again? Most Emacs users I have known are rabid, cultish fans of the application and if they already have their perfectly suitable Emacs why waste the effort to build another without a major reason? And I do not see a major reason like that appearing any time soon.