How much longer

Reading a few blogs this morning and came across a rare (in my experience) full entry on emacs, xemacs and the future. Long read, but interesting. Steve Yegge I think is the author. Quite well reasoned with some quite serious questions! The quote that sums emacs up for me is

Non-Emacs users and casual users simply can't appreciate how rich and rewarding it is, because they have nothing else to compare it to. There are other scriptable applications and systems out there — AppleScript, Firefox, things like that. They're fun and useful. But Emacs is self-hosting: writing things in it makes the environment itself more powerful. It's a feedback loop: a recursive, self-reinforcing, multiplicative effect that happens because you're enhancing the environment you're using to create enhancements.

It's really quite hard to describe, but that hits it quite well. Emacs is good. Emacs is the first app I open when I switch the machine on. Emacs is the tool I turn to for all text work. A bit like AutoCad, it's a question of how to do it, not whether it can do it. And boy can emacs do some odd things! How about emacs as the quintessential Linux tool? If it doesn't do what you want, make it. Tweak it, configure it.

Steve mentions Patterns of Software, one of the increasing number of books which some folk seem to realise will sell past their publication date, so they buy a few copies and hike the price to the silly levels. I also found something at this url, in PDF though. Unsure if it's the same as the dead tree version. Anyone read it? Steve gives it a good recommendation.