Like I said in the essay, the bloat objection to emacs is irrational. Nonetheless, though, it's a natural reaction that most people have to get over.
The key to appreciating emacs is to realize that it's only incidentally a text editor. It's really a not-quite-general-purpose application platform for tasks that fall under the broad heading of "text processing". Similarly, Mozilla has evolved into a not-quite-general-purpose platform for interacting with internet services. With the advent of Web 2.0 the world seems to have suddenly embraced that interpretation of Mozilla. Before that, people used to gripe about Mozilla bloat in the same way that they still gripe about emacs bloat. (Think Zawinski's Law.)
Like I said in the essay, the bloat objection to emacs is irrational. Nonetheless, though, it's a natural reaction that most people have to get over.
The key to appreciating emacs is to realize that it's only incidentally a text editor. It's really a not-quite-general-purpose application platform for tasks that fall under the broad heading of "text processing". Similarly, Mozilla has evolved into a not-quite-general-purpose platform for interacting with internet services. With the advent of Web 2.0 the world seems to have suddenly embraced that interpretation of Mozilla. Before that, people used to gripe about Mozilla bloat in the same way that they still gripe about emacs bloat. (Think Zawinski's Law.)