> I'm convinced most of the "Emacs is hard" crowd is just send fulfilling propaganda. So many think it is harder than alternatives because that is just what you say.
It's not too hard for people to learn, sure. But it's also a much steeper learning curve to get value from compared to IDEs or to VSCode. The latter are really quite nice out of the box.
And it's surely way easier for a novice to dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of with Emacs compared to VSCode.
I think spending some time to know your tools better is a good thing. But for those who don't have the time or interest, I wouldn't say Emacs is a great choice.
I'm not convinced. I recently installed VSCode after all that hype and I'm somewhat disappointed. Without referring to external media, it's not all that easy to get anything done. It isn't exactly intuitive. It takes effort like anything else.
(full disclosure: these days I'm almost exclusively an Emacs user, but for Java I might use IntelliJ instead and long time ago, when VisualAge for Java was still around, I evaluated a bunch of Java IDEs for the company I worked for)
And on this, I just disagree. It feels faster to use vs code for people that are used to tools like vs code. For novices, though, they are all complicated.
Worse, for many IDEs, the worst hole to dig is where you tie yourself to the IDE. Too many times have I seen projects that only build on a particular desktop with the press of a button on a particular IDE. :(
It's not too hard for people to learn, sure. But it's also a much steeper learning curve to get value from compared to IDEs or to VSCode. The latter are really quite nice out of the box.
And it's surely way easier for a novice to dig themselves into a hole they can't get out of with Emacs compared to VSCode.
I think spending some time to know your tools better is a good thing. But for those who don't have the time or interest, I wouldn't say Emacs is a great choice.