RE: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > trust Emacs to be active and improving by 2018?
> 
> Emacs was written in 1985, so it will be 30 years old soon.  I
> think it can go on another 30 years :-)

It's really more like 40 years that people have been using Emacs.
GNU Emacs will be 30 in two more years (soon, but not that soon).

Emacs was developed in the early-to-mid 70s.  RMS wrote the
original "Emacs" (adding "macros" to editor TECO) in 1976.

GNU and GNU Emacs date from the mid 80s.  GNU was announced as
a proposed project in 1983, and development started in 1984.
FSF dates from 1985.  GNU Emacs was first released in 1985.

In the early-to-mid 80s people used Emacs, but not GNU Emacs.
There were some (non-GNU, non-RMS) Emacsen written in Lisp and 
available since the late 70s, but not on Unix (and there was
no GNU/Linux).

On Unix, there was only Gosling Emacs through much of the 80s.
It had neither Lisp (!) nor real lists (!), and arguments were
passed using a strange workaround.  Nevertheless, people hacked
with it, customized their init files, shared their code, used
TAGS files and Info (IIRC), and did most of the other things we
still do with Emacs.

So **40** years, and counting...

[http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs]