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

[Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>]

Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> writes:

> "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
>
>>> Sadly, vim outvotes all flavours of GNU emacs on the above graph when
>>> added to it (although to be fair, on Debian emacs is not installed by
>>> default but some flavour of vi is).
>>
>> Hm. Dunno why that should make one sad. I would never use vi or vim (unless I
>> had to), but I don't see why I should be sad or bothered if other people find it
>> useful. One person likes to live in the forest; another prefers the city; a
>> third the shore.
>>
>> Why the need to make Emacs the most popular? It's good to make Emacs better, but
>> what's the popularity contest about? Perhaps Americans on average listen to
>> Britney Spears more than Mozart or Muddy Waters. So what?
>>
>> On the other hand, info about the relative use of different Emacs versions is
>> (mildly) interesting and might be helpful in some ways.
>>
>
> Well said Drew. Agree 100%
>
> Tim

There seems to be a tendency in emacs circles to take any suggestion
which might make emacs more popular as some sort of push to make it for
thickies or dumb it down. The Britney v Mozart rebuttal is a worn old
war horse wheeled out frequently in such arguments :-;

Making something more widely used can only benefit the whole
community. People did not put man years into it for a small few. People
like their work to be used.

So personally, I *do* care if I think emacs is losing share. If it is
then something is wrong and people should consider ways of addressing
it. The "I dont care as it works for me" attitude is somewhat anti the
whole Open and Free movement IMO.


-- 
 important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.  ~Dennis Gabor, Innovations:  Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970