> you have to learn an old and obscure LISP dialect for it
As someone who is glancingly familiar with emacs (I have only ever written one elisp function, that too with help) it's a really stupid question, but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? That would increase the number of people who can program for it and customize it.
> in 20 years from now Emacs will still be around
I think the real risk for emacs is, over the years, slowly losing the pool of people who care enough to contribute to it -- not just core developers, but also people who write packages, themes, etc. I already see a lot of developers who think Atom / VSCode / Sublime Text is "good enough". You may choose to discount Sublime because it's closed source (I do despite loving it otherwise), but VSCode and Atom are open-source and browser technology is only going to get better.
As someone who is glancingly familiar with emacs (I have only ever written one elisp function, that too with help) it's a really stupid question, but couldn't emacs have bindings for lua or python or something? That would increase the number of people who can program for it and customize it.
> in 20 years from now Emacs will still be around
I think the real risk for emacs is, over the years, slowly losing the pool of people who care enough to contribute to it -- not just core developers, but also people who write packages, themes, etc. I already see a lot of developers who think Atom / VSCode / Sublime Text is "good enough". You may choose to discount Sublime because it's closed source (I do despite loving it otherwise), but VSCode and Atom are open-source and browser technology is only going to get better.