Re: Is Emacs very alive, active and improving?

[W. Greenhouse]

Jorge,

Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto <jorgepeixotomorais@gmail.com> writes:

> http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=emacs editor,eclipse ide
>
>   Since 2004 Eclipse (Emac's primary competiton for my use case) has
> lost some 71% of its "trendiness" according to Google.  But Emacs has
> lost more, dropping from 25 to 4 (84% less).
>
>   Does this Google Trends graph reflect reality?

I don't think Google Trends is an accurate measure of how many people
are using Emacs, because Emacs is largely self-documenting, not just
through the Info manuals but also from the dynamically generated
documentation from Elisp programs themselves.  So I would expect Emacs
users to Google their programming environment far less than editors of
other platforms.

>   I am worried because I have personally met only one other Emacs user
> (not counting people I only talked to via the Internet).  Of course,
> popularity is far from the only criteria, I don't have to obey fashion
> (if I did, I wouldn't be using GNU/Linux).  But I do want my
> development environment to be reasonably active, improving and well
> supported.  Can I reasonably trust Emacs to be active and improving by
> 2018?  At least as a LaTeX editor, IDE for C++, Python, Javascript and
> Java, and general text editor.
>
>   Thank you for your attention.  Sorry for any bad English, I am Brazilian.

I think that Emacs is one of very few pieces of software which we can
expect will still be active and improving by 2018.  This prediction is
based on its last 30 years of steady development (40+ if we count the
many non-GNU Emacsen).  It has a longer development history than most
operating systems running people's personal computers, and it continues
to evolve, both in terms of user experience as an editor and in terms of
extensibility as one of the most popular Lisp runtimes.  Some time
before 2018 we can hopefully see the fruition of features currently
being developed such as integration with the Guile runtime [1] and full
concurrency. [2]

I think the Emacs developer community is currently experiencing a
renaissance.  See http://j.mp/emacs2013videos for what some Emacs Lisp
developers are working on right now, from the London Emacsconf this
year.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=summary

[2]  http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/concurrency/files

--
Regards,
WGG