Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Rasmus]

Hi Phillip,

address@hidden (Phillip Lord) writes:

> Rasmus <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>>     Thinking of Emacs as an entire ecosystem, most of Emacs is already
>>>     maintained independently from either Emacs core or GNU ELPA.
>>>
>>> That is a shocking statement -- is it really true?
>>
>> Using the download statistics from MELPA (attached) there's some
>> packages with more than 20000 downloads.  Now I'm not clear how this
>> metrics come about, e.g. are upgrades counted as download and what it
>> the time window etc.?
>
> Yep, upgrades will be downloads. A number of packages on there are used
> for integration testing. So, I pull down dash on every checking for
> several of my projects. In time, I am sure dash will become the most
> downloaded package because of this.

I don't "get" dash and s, but lots of people developing more
impressive things than I will ever be able to do seem happy with it so
who am I to judge?  When I write a patch, I intend it to become part
of core, so dash/s are not options.

> Once Emacs switches to git, I would guess the percentage of people on
> this list who do not install magit will shrink to a tiny number. My
> guesses are often wrong though!

Magit is nice, and probably for a git gui *the best* you can get, but
I'm still frustrated by it (how do I format-patch?!) and must often
default to the terminal.  The manual and things like staging are
wonderful though.

—Rasmus

PS: I should have included this statistics before

;; Potential ELPA  downloads
(- (apply '+ (mapcar 'cadr melpa))
   (apply '+ (mapcar 'cadr (remove-if (lambda (x) (member (car x) elpa)) 
melpa)))) => 196884

But this number makes little sense, as the most important components
of Emacs are already part of the Emacs tarball (dired, gnus, org,
prog-modes).  Consider Python where Emacs has a *very* good mode
build-in.  Elpy "only" has 7790 downloads (but thanks for your work
Jörgen, it's awesome!).

—Rasmus

-- 
Governments should be afraid of their people