Re: Emacs's popularity (was: Distributed Maintenance for Emacs)

["Peter Milliken" <peter.milliken@gmail.com>]

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It is difficult to tell if the emacs user base is "dying" - all I can do is
comment from experience. I have been a programmer for 25+ years now. In the
"early" days, Emacs and Vi were two of the main contenders - because Unix
was one of the most popular OS's (I used VAX's for a while - but neither was
available there). When IBM/Microsoft put PC's on everybodies desks, the
proliferation of "other" editors started to explode.

In my working experience, once PC's hit the desktop, Emacs or Vi were NEVER
the popular editor. So for at least the last 20+ years, I have been
virtually the only user in the organisation that I was currently working for
at the time using Emacs (or an Emacs look-alike - in the early days of PC's,
before DJ Delorie came along, you used things like "micro Emacs" if you were
an Emacs junkie). My current organisation has about 30 - 40 programmers
across a number of small projects - there are only two of us using Emacs :-)


So whether you can define Emacs as dying out - or just holding it's own is a
matter of perspective :-) Certainly you are likely to find a much higher
user base with OS's such as Debian's distribution of Linux - but I haven't
ever worked for an organisation that put machines running Linux on our desks
- managers like to play safe by spending lots of money with Microsoft and
getting the lowest common denominator on everybodies desk...

Pete

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 6:31 AM, Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> Leo (2008-12-15 18:24 +0000) wrote:
>
> > On 2008-12-14 21:37 +0000, Xah Lee wrote:
> >> I really feel sorry emacs's user base is dying. The most important
> >> thing i think is to get emacs to use modern terminologies and be
> >> compatible with the minimum of standard modern UI.
> >
> > Users are not scared off by Emacs's UI. It is more important its
> > functionality.
>
> Are people being scared off in the first place? I mean more than
> normally. :-)
>
> I don't know but at least among Debian GNU/Linux users Emacs's
> popularity doesn't seem to have decreased. Here's a Debian popularity
> contest[1] graph that shows the popularity of packages emacs21,
> emacs21-nox, emacs22, emacs22-nox and emacs22-gtk:
>
>    http://preview.tinyurl.com/55stry [2]
>
> The graph shows that Emacs22 started gaining popularity around mid-2007
> (the release) and Emacs21 started losing it. Those summed together Emacs
> is no less popular than before. The latest official Debian release (4.0
> "Etch") includes Emacs21.
>
> This popularity measurement category is called "vote". It means that
> user has accessed (atime) the files in the package within 30 days. It
> roughly means that the software is actually being used, not only
> installed.
>
>
> ---------------
> [1] http://popcon.debian.org/
>
> [2]
> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emacs21%2Cemacs21-nox%2Cemacs22%2Cemacs22-gtk%2Cemacs22-nox&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1
>

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