I love Emacs, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s a lot harder to use than Visual Studio Code, which is vastly more popular. I think what made VSCode popular was the availability of many high-quality extensions for major languages. Unfortunately, my experience with Elisp packages is that they tend to be much less stable. This is changing some with LSP mode, of course, but I think the Emacs community would do well to focus on improving the story for plug-in stability in the long-term. I already have to install use-package to make handling packages reasonable, which is not something I have to do in other editors. Manually setting up hooks for them is a pain in the ass too.
I once submitted a bug to the Emacs mailing list and after determining it was indeed a defect, a flame war ensued between maintainers of different subsystems that were competing over how a specific feature was supposed to be used, which was the source of the bug. It was offputting and felt juvenile. Social problems are inevitable in any open source project, but I can’t help but wonder if the highly dynamic nature of Emacs Lisp causes more problems than a less dynamic language would.
I once submitted a bug to the Emacs mailing list and after determining it was indeed a defect, a flame war ensued between maintainers of different subsystems that were competing over how a specific feature was supposed to be used, which was the source of the bug. It was offputting and felt juvenile. Social problems are inevitable in any open source project, but I can’t help but wonder if the highly dynamic nature of Emacs Lisp causes more problems than a less dynamic language would.