Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

Sorry Jean Louis but I totally disagree with all your opinions.

1) Yes, emacs popularity is NOT growing even without proportions, not
relative or absolute numbers grow. You look at younger projects like
sublime, atom, VSCode, notepad++, even vim is MUCH more popular than
us. Just search editor ranking and you will see. Numbers are not
opinions... that's the good about numbers.

2) There were some emails some weeks ago with some statistics and data
but you can check many of them online. 

3) Not only numbers but also community interaction and references to
emacs are negligible if we compare with much newer projects around. 

4) Also the number of developers is a measurement... specially the
number of young and new developers... Most people prefer to just develop
small packages and project and never even try to join to the core
development. We should be worried about that and ask us why.

5) Denying the importance of the statistics here is like trusting the
health of the project to feelings and hopes... Actually there are many
ways to measure the health-maintainability-popularity of a project from
different points of view (downloads, google hits, references, scientific
articles related, number of threads in reddit, editor rankings, views
and likes in youtube channel of related videos...) If you don't trust
statistics then just look at the starts and ask them.

I don't consider this as a competition; but as developers this is
important:

Popularity is proportional to users, users to potential developers and
potential developers to new functionalities, updates, code reviews, new
ideas. The less professional and newer users usually find issues more
often than the advanced programmers.



On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 08:16:06AM +0300, Jean Louis wrote:
>Emacs is today more popular than ever. There is no decline in
>popularity, there is increase in popularity.
>
>If one is developing or let's say simply loving Emacs as software,
>then one should look into how many new users are coming to Emacs and
>how spread and disseminated is Emacs and what impact it does, and if
>that impact is greater and greater or lesser and lesser.
>
>There is no point in measuring various other editors and looking into
>the proportional statistics of editor usage, to say that Emacs is not
>popular, as that is incorrect, inadequate, let me also say false
>statistics, that spreads doubts, it's negative energy.
>
>Let me give you example:
>
>Time period 1:
>
>- emacs users 20
>- other editor A 20
>- other editor B 35
>
>Time period 2:
>
>- emacs users 25
>- other editor A 23
>- other editor B 38
>
>Time period 3:
>
>- emacs users 30
>- other editor A 30
>- other editor B 42
>
>In this blunt example, if you look into how many other editors are
>used and compare that to Emacs, you could be saying that Emacs is not
>popular.
>
>But that is wrong way of looking into things, what one has to look is
>if Emacs is being used more and more.
>
>If I sell bread from my own bakery, I do not mind and it becomes
>really not relevant, if so many other bakeries are out there, also
>seling all kinds of bread.
>
>What really makes impact to me, as from my viewpoint, is if my bread
>is selling more and more. As that is the one true statistics of
>improvement and impact.
>
>Statistics of improvement and impact and popularity of Emacs should be
>watched from Emacs distribution statistics.
>
>I have no access to YouTube, as I did not pay tax for Internte here in
>Uganda and don't use VPN to access it, but I think that YouTube offers
>searches by time, so one could search for Emacs in specific year
>maybe, as what I know is that today there are more and more Emacs
>presentations and videos, and more and more people speak about Emacs,
>as I am observing it last 21 years, I can say today is Emacs more
>popular than ever.
>
>Jean
>