News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Linus on "acting professionally" by kragen on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:31PM (#6073951)
Indeed, comp.lang.lisp is now irrelevant; but it wasn't irrelevant at the time Erik retired from it, despite his strenuous efforts.

However, I wasn't talking about only Common Lisp users, but about users of all Lisps. Elisp and Clojure have similarly-sized Freenode channels #emacs and #clojure, each substantially bigger than #lisp. Various estimates of the number of Emacs users put them around 5–50k people: there are perhaps around 15000 Elisp users http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3311227/emacs-user-base-s... or 0.5% of Ubuntu users using Elisp http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/35312/emacs-u... (some tens of thousands) or 5300 Github users with Elisp repositories http://www.quora.com/How-many-people-use-emacs-per-day?share....

Re:Linus on "acting professionally" by lispm on Friday July 19, 2013 @10:26PM (#6074093)
How is using an editor making them Lisp users? Are users of Google's flight search engine, written in Common Lisp, making them Common Lisp users? Are AutoCAD users Lisp users?

How many Emacs users just use it? How many already need help to configure .emacs ?

Re:Linus on "acting professionally" by kragen on Friday July 19, 2013 @10:38PM (#6074123)
Typically AutoCAD users are not AutoLISP users. (By the way, AutoLISP conses are also immutable, although you have complained that the immutability and resulting "persistence" of Clojure lists counts against calling it a Lisp.) But typically Emacs users are indeed Elisp users, because they read, write, and modify Elisp code. That's why there are several thousand Elisp repositories on GitHub.