emacsconf 2019 - first draft

Signed-off-by: Joseph Nuthalapati <njoseph@riseup.net>

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+title: "EmacsConf 2019"
+date: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
+lastmod: 2019-11-03T15:40:09+05:30
+tags : [ "free-software", "emacs" ]
+categories : [ "conferences" ]
+layout: post
+type:  "post"
+highlight: false
+---
+
+![EmacsConf logo](https://emacsconf.org/s/emacsconf-logo1-256.png)
+
+I attended the [EmacsConf 2019](https://emacsconf.org/2019/ "EmacsConf 2019") on
+2nd November. It was offered as a video stream that anyone can watch over the
+internet, with audience conversations over IRC. The conference was powered
+entirely by free software tools. RMS and some FSF members were also among the
+audience.
+
+One of the speakers called Emacs the mother of all free software. When RMS
+started the free software movement, one of the first tools he built was Emacs,
+using which all other free software was developed, starting with glibc. A lot of
+free software development is done on 40+ years old Emacs even to this day.
+
+The core of emacs is written in C with Elisp offered as an extension language.
+All of the elisp source code that is running on your Emacs is available easily
+through Emacs itself. Elisp is designed to be an easy-to-use minimalistic
+language that non-programmers can use to create small improvements in their
+workflow.
+
+The most controversial talk and the one that generated the most conversation at
+the conference was a talk titled "Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years" by
+Perry E. Metzger. It was quite a ranty talk by an Emacs user of over 20+ years.
+He mentioned that MacOS has better Emacs-everywhere keybindings as compared to
+mainstream GNU/Linux distributions that come with Gnome and KDE. I have to agree
+on this particular thing. But having used Emacs on MacOS myself, I had way too
+many segfaults and bad GUI experience. This was a much worse user experience in
+my opinion. My problems can be easily dismissed as user faults, well so can his.
+One might simply say that he could've used StumpWM or something that has better
+Emacs keybindings (I picked up StumpWM from B. Slade's talk at the same
+conference). The speaker goes on to recommend gradually replacing parts of Emacs
+with better languages that can stand the test of time, using a concept from
+philosophy called the Ship of Theseus. The core of Emacs can be changed from C -
+a dangerous language according to the speaker - to a relatively safer language
+like Rust. Elisp is not such a great language either with all the functions
+staying in the global scope. Maybe a better Lisp would do well as a replacement.
+I have to agree on both. The speaker says that we should put in the effort to
+design a programming language specificially for the use case of Emacs and not
+settle for a general purpose language. Also, the new language should
+interoperate with elisp since there's too much of it to replace without decades
+of work (e.g. org-mode has 120k lines of elisp). The importance of concurrency
+and parallelism in the new language is also stressed.
+
+Though most of the talks were about people doing cool things with Emacs, I was
+more emotionally touched by these two talks - "GNU Emacs as software freedom in
+practice" by an FSF member Greg Farough and "How to record executable notes with
+eev - and how to play them back" by Eduardo Ochs. These two talks emphasized
+the freedom that Emacs gives to its users, whether they are programmers or not.
+Both the speakers use Emacs the way it is meant to be used. They truly used
+Elisp as an extension language. I highly recommend watching the talks after
+they're posted. This got me thinking. Though I am primarily a programmer and use
+Emacs for almost all text editing, I barely programmed anything in Emacs - the
+programmable text editor. This is mostly because I think that my newbie elisp
+scripts are not as good as the ones already available as Elisp packages, so I
+refrain from writing elisp at all. I realized that this is not how Emacs is
+meant to be used. Emacs is all about taking the free software editor built by
+the community, making it your own through customization and contributing your
+improvements back to the community if you can.