I think the only way to make Emacs popular is to get more users. And in any of the over six thousand human languages in use today: "Emacs user" typically means

I think the only way to make Emacs popular is to get more users. And in any of the over six thousand human languages in use today: "Emacs user" typically means "a programmer". Emacs desperately needs more programmers. Unfortunately, many of the core Emacs developers are also FSF advocates. Some of them have very radical and uncompromising views. It sometimes feels like they have little understanding of the real world and the software industry in general, and they live in the 16th century equivalent of the computing world. I mean, many of us (software developers) are very sympathetic to the cause and the idea of liberating all software, but sometimes it just gets too crazy. As if someone tried saving the world by harassing palm oil plantation workers in Indonesia: "Why don't you try planting cedar trees instead?". Vilifying and fighting the evil in the industry is right; punishing everyone indiscriminately - is not. One of the latest examples: a question about LSP server implementation for Emacs Lisp - the verdict of the people in charge? Nope, we shouldn't do it because: "it would allow editing Emacs Lisp in non-free programs like VSCode". Seriously? IMO, it's not just a simple non-sense, it actually sounds like borderline narcissistic schitzo thinking. Emacs codebase needs to adopt the ubiquitous and familiar model of issues and pull requests instead of clinging to the outdated way of email threads and patches. That's what made Neovim popular. That's how VSCode achieved in just five years, what was like twenty for Emacs. That's why the most innovation in Emacs happens today outside of its core. Today GitHub, GitLab, and other Git forges have so much Emacs Lisp - it's probably the most widely used Lisp in the industry (maybe even comparable to Clojure and Common Lisp). And guess what? Authors and maintainers of those awesome libs and packages not sending patches over email. I don't think Emacs is going to fade away anytime soon. But the strategic mistakes made by the core decision-makers have done irredeemable damage, and Emacs now doomed to play catch-up.