I became a hardcore emacs user 29 years ago (yes! Really! The first emacs I used was the excellent implementation on Multics by Bernie Greenberg). But a lot of time has passed since then and the exponent in Moore's law has changed everything. And yet there's a hardcore emacs population out there that I've been slowly trying to convince to join the modern age. I had been exchanging email with one of them, John Wetherill. He finally broke down, tried NetBeans, and sent me this email:

I've been a hardcore emacs user for 20 years, and after some extremely horrible experiences with various IDEs, my resistance to trying NetBeans was enormous. But after your suggestion I spent the effort getting up to speed, and ... it's CHANGED MY LIFE! I can't believe what a great tool NB is. I've been losing sleep discovering all these cool features.

I can see that I will now view my development career as "Before NetBeans" and "After NetBeans". I'm not exaggerating. It is just that cool. I want to evangelize it, and plan on spending a bit of time doing so at my J1 session.

OK I'll shut up now. Thanks for persuading me to switch. :)

'nuff said. I can't wait to see what he says after he tries out the new code editor in NB6 (download the latest build from netbeans.org)