I thought the same thing. I was also curious about the ordering of the languages, which didn’t seem to be in alphabetical order, or any order of popularity. It made me unsure whether Common Lisp really was missing, or whether it was me who couldn’t find it.
When I filled it out, I believe there was a tooltip saying the list came from Stack Overflow’s latest survey. They are in a decent place to know popularity, so I don’t think it’s a terrible choice.
It should be pointed out that this is (unsurpisingly, due to non-free JS) not organized by the official Emacs developer team, but by the Reddit/MELPA-aligned side of the community.
There were debates on the mailing list the last few weeks, and emacs-devel was generally against a web-form, and more interested in plain-text reponses, as is also offered here.
Honestly, I’m a long time emacs user, but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of filling out a text file and mailing it to some mailing list.
It’s policies like this that prevent more involvement from the community and that makes younger developers consider the emacs community a bunch of archaic fossils that are getting left behind.
Which is a shame. Emacs is a great tool, but it could do with some modern creature comforts.
Basically MELPA is extremely loose about what gets listed, the GNU ELPA thing requires copyright assignment and also you can’t be promoting the use of non-free software (so no package to interface with Google Calendar for example).
This (according to Emacs’ maintainers at least) leads to MELPA stuff being all over the place in terms of quality and also ethical good-ness
One of their complaints is also that MELPA allows packages that promotes or integrates with propriatory tools and services that don’t respect the users privacy. My personal problem with MELPA is that their “main” system is built around updating the packages for every new commit, instead of what MELPA stable or ELPA do.
Historically melpa’s security policies have been very bad; it took them something like three years to remove packages that were getting loaded from a publicly-editable wiki (Yes, really. No, it’s not a joke.) and multiple years to disable non-TLS downloading of packages.
Nowadays they don’t have any remaining obvious screwups like that, but they have some nasty policies like rewriting the version numbers of packages (very annoying if you’re an upstream maintainer getting bug reports) or requiring Javascript just to view package listings.
I don’t think I would put much stock in the results of this survey. I found I was just making up answers to get past questions because the answers didn’t seem to fit my use case. For example, in the first question, does the answer “Use it for work” mean for my employment or when I just have to do something? Also, what does “research writing” mean in comparison to “writing”? The question about what you disable if you run the GUI version can also be applied to the terminal version, for the most part. The question about which programming languages you use is a checkbox in the web form, but free form in the org-mode form you can download and email.
This seems hastily put together. I’m a little concerned what kinds of conclusions are going to be drawn from this data.
From what I have read, the results will be taken with a grain of salt, and no conclusions will be based soley on what the outcome of this poll is. It was organized by just one person, so that probably accounts for most of the mistakes.
Interesting that “Scheme” and “Common Lisp” aren’t in the radio options for “languages you write in with Emacs”.
I thought the same thing. I was also curious about the ordering of the languages, which didn’t seem to be in alphabetical order, or any order of popularity. It made me unsure whether Common Lisp really was missing, or whether it was me who couldn’t find it.
It’s a poorly done survey that should be ignored.
When I filled it out, I believe there was a tooltip saying the list came from Stack Overflow’s latest survey. They are in a decent place to know popularity, so I don’t think it’s a terrible choice.
It should be pointed out that this is (unsurpisingly, due to non-free JS) not organized by the official Emacs developer team, but by the Reddit/MELPA-aligned side of the community.
There were debates on the mailing list the last few weeks, and emacs-devel was generally against a web-form, and more interested in plain-text reponses, as is also offered here.
Honestly, I’m a long time emacs user, but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of filling out a text file and mailing it to some mailing list.
It’s policies like this that prevent more involvement from the community and that makes younger developers consider the emacs community a bunch of archaic fossils that are getting left behind.
Which is a shame. Emacs is a great tool, but it could do with some modern creature comforts.
Oh, I sincerely thought it was the fact that MELPA is mentioned that gave it away.
I use emacs all the time, what’s the deal with MELPA?
It’s where I get my packages, but is there some kind of split between Emacs core and MELPA? Are they somehow at odds?
Basically MELPA is extremely loose about what gets listed, the GNU ELPA thing requires copyright assignment and also you can’t be promoting the use of non-free software (so no package to interface with Google Calendar for example).
This (according to Emacs’ maintainers at least) leads to MELPA stuff being all over the place in terms of quality and also ethical good-ness
One of their complaints is also that MELPA allows packages that promotes or integrates with propriatory tools and services that don’t respect the users privacy. My personal problem with MELPA is that their “main” system is built around updating the packages for every new commit, instead of what MELPA stable or ELPA do.
Historically melpa’s security policies have been very bad; it took them something like three years to remove packages that were getting loaded from a publicly-editable wiki (Yes, really. No, it’s not a joke.) and multiple years to disable non-TLS downloading of packages.
Nowadays they don’t have any remaining obvious screwups like that, but they have some nasty policies like rewriting the version numbers of packages (very annoying if you’re an upstream maintainer getting bug reports) or requiring Javascript just to view package listings.
Yes, but not everyone knows about that discussion, so I just wanted to hightlight it here.
I don’t think I would put much stock in the results of this survey. I found I was just making up answers to get past questions because the answers didn’t seem to fit my use case. For example, in the first question, does the answer “Use it for work” mean for my employment or when I just have to do something? Also, what does “research writing” mean in comparison to “writing”? The question about what you disable if you run the GUI version can also be applied to the terminal version, for the most part. The question about which programming languages you use is a checkbox in the web form, but free form in the org-mode form you can download and email.
This seems hastily put together. I’m a little concerned what kinds of conclusions are going to be drawn from this data.
From what I have read, the results will be taken with a grain of salt, and no conclusions will be based soley on what the outcome of this poll is. It was organized by just one person, so that probably accounts for most of the mistakes.
Then I suspect we can just ignore the results and doing the survey is a waste of time.
Where the fuck is lisp in the list of programming languages!?