Why? When someone learns Java they learn Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. When someone learns C++ they learn Visual Studio or QtCreator/KDevelop/CodeBlocks... And so on.
I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs. All of the editors you mentioned use a paradigm of text editing familiar to everyone who has used Notepad. When starting out with Emacs, you even need to learn how to quit it.
> I don't think one can compare the difficulty of learning IntelliJ IDEA with the difficulty of learning Emacs.
Of course you can. Granted, I don't use IntelliJ, but I used PyCharm, Komodo and Visual Studio, among others. Emacs is easier to learn: despite decades of cruft it's more consistent and follows the rule of least astonishment closer than PyCharm. The problem is that PyCharm and other IDEs build on conventions already familiar to most users (locking themselves to these conventions, which limits their usability for powerusers, but that's another matter), while Emacs doesn't. That's because Emacs predates these conventions. Still, there are many efforts which make Emacs much more familiar to "normal people".
As LightTable failed (and I'm not sure what's happening with Atom) Emacs is once again the most modern text and code editor.
> When starting out with Emacs, you even need to learn how to quit it.
I think you're thinking about VIM, and even there (with gVIM) it's not true. Do you seriously believe what you wrote or is it just flamebait?
Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and I love Vim and I strongly recommend learning them — the effort is worth it. However, I don't think it's the case that you can compare their difficulty curves with those of a "normal" editor. You do, however, make a good point that Emacs is more consistent.
Anyhow, just for fun, decided to install Emacs, SBCL and Slime. Each is available in the standard Ubuntu repository. Open Emacs, M-x slime, and I'm programming in Common Lisp. Different for sure, but that's the point of Common Lisp. No one uses it because it's similar to Java or C, but because it promises things like interactive development, flexibility and customization.
By this argument, if I shipped a customized emacs with e.g. C-c for copy C-v for paste and C-q for quit, and slime and sbcl bundled inside, that would make slime as accessible as eclipse/intellij/visual studio?
I'm willing to try it (really not that hard to do), but I bet good money that many people would still balk because it's spelled E-M-A-C-S.
