For those who don't really know what Emacs is (besides being an editor), I found this overview video from Steve Yegge as excellent. I never used Emacs, so it was very informing for me:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkIicfzPBys">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkIicfzPBys</a><p>One particular aspect that intrigued me: you can extend VS Code (and similiar), but it's a lot of work and boilerplate to create a plugin whose actual functionality is 3 lines of code (let's say toLowercase()). In emacs, you can just write those 3 lines of code and that's it, that's your plugin.
The fact that about 10% maintains an elisp package, and that about 90% can program in elisp, makes me suspect the outcomes are skewed. Either that, or emacs is doomed.
I wonder what conclusion people want to draw from such a "survey". Whom does it represent? Only people who happen to know about the survey and felt motivated enough to work through it. I would therefore guess that it was highly networked Emacs power users and avid consumers of tech news who participated. -- It's hard to escape the echo chamber.
Those are raw results, not edited for presentation. For example "favourite packages" just gives answers as is rather considering that input was comma-separated list. Interestingly a significant majority of surveyees are from HN and r/emacs. And for anyone seeing the "Vector{String}" and wonders, yes, the framework utilized for the survey is written in Julia.