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common lisp

emacsredux.com

Recently I learned of the first-ever State of Emacs survey and I wanted to share a few thought about it with my readers. Okay, the survey is officially named just “Emacs Survey”, but it clearly draws a lot of inspiration from the numerous “State of Technology X” surveys that have become popular in recent years. That’s why I took the liberty to re-frame it in a way that will probably be familiar to more people. The “State of Something” surveys are typically ran by the teams maintaining some project to assess the health of its ecosystem, the needs of their users, the problems that need to be solved, the tools that people are using and so on. A good example would be the State of Clojure, that I participate in every year. There are similar surveys for many programming languages and even for some tools - e.g. I ran in the past a State of CIDER survey.1 Ideally, the data collected from the surveys drives the future development to some extent, and results in a better experience for everyone involved. I can speak from experience that the “State of Clojure” and “State of CIDER” surveys definitely influenced the direction of the projects. The “State of Emacs” survey is a somewhat different, though. One thing that bothers me a bit about the Emacs survey is that its site doesn’t list any clear purpose/goals for the survey. That definitely seems pretty weird to me. I saw the survey discussed on the Emacs mailing list and on Reddit, but sticking a paragraph of rationale on the survey site would have certainly helped. The survey is also not official in the sense, that it’s not initiated by Emacs’s development team, and judging by the hostility the topic generated on the emacs-devel mailing list it’s not like they were particularly excited about it.2 It was funny that most of the comments were complaints about things like the use of non-free JavaScript in the survey form and topics like that, instead of some constructive conversation about the format of the survey. I was especially

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mattdyson.org

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codyhoover.com

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