I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.”
Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.
It is over 40 years old.
When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn from them.
I’m not saying the editor can not be improved. But I think the bar is much higher than this. It’s not an insult to say something like emacs is not “modern.” Of course it’s not. And changing the colors? The shortcuts that have worked for decades? Please.
If someone thinks emacs will be more successful with these cosmetic changes they are welcome to fork it since this is one of the earliest open source programs. Code talks, a bunch of people opining on a mailing list is pretty worthless in comparison.
It's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a generation.
For comparison of numbers and growth rate: VS Code was new in April 2015, had a claimed 2.6 Million active monthly users in Nov 2017[1], became the most popular editor in StackOverflow's user survey in 2018[2] with 34% of respondants and again in 2019 with 50% of respondants, to a claimed 11 million users in 2020[3]. Its codebase has been forked 16,000 times[4].
In 5 years, VS Code has gained more users than the population of Switzerland, than the population of London, than Uber has drivers. I'm not suggesting Emacs ought to chase maximum popularity, but if there was any feeling that "the editor / IDE market was saturated" or "there was no demand for editors", that doesn't seem accurate.
[1] https://vscode-eastus.azurewebsites.net/blogs/2017/11/16/con... - (VS Code has telemetry built in, so Microsoft has some accurate idea of numbers, even if they still have the incentive to hype them up a bit).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code#Reception
[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2020/06/09/go-extension