Steve Yegge on *Emacs, pointing also to the possible future direction of the *browser:
“IDEs are draining users away, but it’s not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It’s the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox…
“… [N]ow the browsers are starting to sprout desktop-quality apps and productivity tools. It won’t be long, I think, before the best Java development environment on the planet is written in JavaScript.”
I’m more of a vi user these days—it behaves much more consistently over emergency ssh sessions—but as a general advocate of Emacs over IDEs I can see his point. Browsers should want to be like Emacs, or at any rate more like the VM of your choice.
Between browser-as-VM, Firefox, ECMAScript and compatibility frameworks there’s the seeds of an RIA revolution. After all, to what extent will industries gladly rest their financial weight on RIAs, so long as they’re all written in Flash-on-the-browser, and so long as browsers remain so unpredictable and Flash remains… well, Flash?
