Re: gnus and pine

[Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>]

Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> writes:

> Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>> I would be interested to know if there are statistics about the gnus userbase.
>>>
>>> Gnus is popular but I am pretty comfident there are not that much
>>> users.
>>
>> A few tens of thousands? And possibly diminishing as emacs loses share
>> with the plethora of alternatives available unfortunately.
>
> Do you mean people leaving Emacs for a "modern" alternative or
> people choosing an alternative without even knowing emacs exists
> ? That's not the same: we can't loose something we never had ;)

I think the more alternatives then the less chance of them even
attempting to use Emacs which we, being the elite ....., know to be
superior to all those alternatives :-;

So we do indeed lose new adopters as a result of alternatives.

(And I do care about Emacs maintaining a large user base since that
guarantees continued support and expansion)

I also know of people leaving emacs because its way behind in the IDE
sense - Eclipse (for example) is much "better" (*) for project
management, debugging, development for many people since it works out of
the box.

People need to share their setups and get the word out!

http://richardriley.net/default/projects/emacs/dotprogramming

(*) Better here being "ready to run" and meeting a core common need in
addition to being infinitely customisable though Java. Things like "just
working" context help, refactoring, debugging, rebuilding etc are there
and ready. Compare that to emacs and the need to add compile commands,
add hooks for devhelp, man pages etc and its quite obvious what is the
easiest to set up even if it is not, ultimately, the most powerful
solution.

-- 
 important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.  ~Dennis Gabor, Innovations:  Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970