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Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though.

Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current coworkers use Emacs and I work in Boston, MA. Personally: I cannot imagine programming without emacs, to me programming is so strongly associated with emacs... Of course, I also understand that it's all personal preference.

sokoloff 6y ago
From your username and Boston's proximity to MIT and FSF, it's possible that your experience isn't totally representative. :) Mine isn't either and I find it hard to imagine owning a computer (or using git beyond the very basic operations) without having access to emacs, but it does seem likely that coworkers won't have completely independent text editor preferences. I would expect to see more VS and VSCode in the Redmond, WA area, even at places that aren't Microsoft.
usr1106 6y ago
> I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Others claim the opposite. Maybe the contradiction is explained by the hiring culture. Startups with emacs users hire more emacs users. Not that they would make emacs usage an explicit criterion or even ask such interview question. But probably there are some properties over-represented in 4% (or whatever the figure is) of programmers that are emacs users. Disclaimer: Part-time emacs user since 1986 or so, full-time emacs user since 1989. Should spend some time to learn the newer features / customize it in a more compatible way with the rest of my software. I am lazy to make "another" editor as Stallman puts it even if I like Lisp hacking occasionally, but I would happily switch to a modernized configuration if it were available upstream.
quanticle 6y ago
This is a "your tiny bubble vs. everyone else" thing. I'm a professional programmer in the US, and, even when I was working in a Clojure shop, I was the only emacs user. Think about that for a second: even working at a company where every dev is paid to write Lisp, I was the only one who bothered to set up emacs. The other developers were using the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ or the Calva plugin for Visual Studio Code. And, to be honest, I can't exactly blame them. I tried setting up Calva the other day, just to experiment, and its out-of-the-box experience was far better than emacs'. It was literally just a matter of installing the extension and loading a Clojure project (I was using Leiningen for my project definition, but Calva supports others as well). It brought up a REPL, it started doing autocomplete, and you could even hover over symbols to view their documentation. And none of this required any kind of manual configuration on the part of the user. At this point, I honestly can't really recommend emacs to any developer who doesn't already know how to use emacs. If you want to start programming, just download VSCode and get the plugins for your favorite language.

sokoloff 6y ago

From your username and Boston's proximity to MIT and FSF, it's possible that your experience isn't totally representative. :) Mine isn't either and I find it hard to imagine owning a computer (or using git beyond the very basic operations) without having access to emacs, but it does seem likely that coworkers won't have completely independent text editor preferences. I would expect to see more VS and VSCode in the Redmond, WA area, even at places that aren't Microsoft.

usr1106 6y ago

> I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Others claim the opposite. Maybe the contradiction is explained by the hiring culture. Startups with emacs users hire more emacs users. Not that they would make emacs usage an explicit criterion or even ask such interview question. But probably there are some properties over-represented in 4% (or whatever the figure is) of programmers that are emacs users. Disclaimer: Part-time emacs user since 1986 or so, full-time emacs user since 1989. Should spend some time to learn the newer features / customize it in a more compatible way with the rest of my software. I am lazy to make "another" editor as Stallman puts it even if I like Lisp hacking occasionally, but I would happily switch to a modernized configuration if it were available upstream.

quanticle 6y ago

This is a "your tiny bubble vs. everyone else" thing. I'm a professional programmer in the US, and, even when I was working in a Clojure shop, I was the only emacs user. Think about that for a second: even working at a company where every dev is paid to write Lisp, I was the only one who bothered to set up emacs. The other developers were using the Clojure plugin for IntelliJ or the Calva plugin for Visual Studio Code. And, to be honest, I can't exactly blame them. I tried setting up Calva the other day, just to experiment, and its out-of-the-box experience was far better than emacs'. It was literally just a matter of installing the extension and loading a Clojure project (I was using Leiningen for my project definition, but Calva supports others as well). It brought up a REPL, it started doing autocomplete, and you could even hover over symbols to view their documentation. And none of this required any kind of manual configuration on the part of the user. At this point, I honestly can't really recommend emacs to any developer who doesn't already know how to use emacs. If you want to start programming, just download VSCode and get the plugins for your favorite language.