Re: Emacs users a dying breed?

[Tom]

Jeremiah Dodds <jeremiah.dodds <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> No, why should Emacs and users and developers of Emacs be concerned with
> increasing the interest in Emacs? It's already a name that practically
> everyone who writes software has heard of, and the type of people that
> like it stick with it.
> 

The problem is the decreasing interest indicates that emacs is a
less useful tool in some areas and people choose the better tool
available. People don't necessarily choose other tools, becasue
they are nice and shiny. I heard lots of time from people that
they would use Emacs if it supported Java development as well as
Eclipse.

If I had to do Android development then I'd also choose Eclipse,
because the support it gives for developing with big Java
libraries is such a big advantage that Emacs' superior text editing
cannot compensate. I've been using Emacs for more than 15 years,
but I don't use it religiously, I use it if it is best tool for
the task.

One can say emacs is still useful for developing in C and stuff
and it's true, but I'd like to use it for Android and other
development, and that's why the decreasing interest is
important, because it says Emacs lags behind the competition in
important areas.

If this lagging behind is not addressed then Emacs will become
more and more a niche tool and less of a generally useful and
capable tool which can be efficienly used for most kinds of
tasks.