@AbbieNormal i find it very hard to accept that the freedom angle is naive, when it lets me use and modify changes to software i would not otherwise have been able to afford.

there's no getting around that. even a 50% usable free solution trumps an expensive proprietary one if you can't afford the proprietary one.

@AbbieNormal what is YOUR solution to the issue it raises?

@AbbieNormal do you use clojure, or clojurescript?

@AbbieNormal the article has no solutions. people who write free software shouldn't be forced to work for free.

@AbbieNormal i don't run into your problems with free software. clearly, it works for me.

@AbbieNormal commercial lisp environments have largely failed, if userbase is a measure of success. they, too, made money from users. they also had far better user interfaces than the alternatives.

users didn't want lisp.

@AbbieNormal the minute they want to change how vscoe works or how emacs works, the syntax comes to the fore.

@AbbieNormal how is it a lie? it's still free! i can still make changes to it!

@AbbieNormal it is more usable because they make money from users.

@AbbieNormal so run a test -- show people vscode and emacs and see which they prefer. i've used emacs since 1993 and i know what people will do.

@AbbieNormal or that free software is bad because you don't want to (or can't) pay for the effort to make it do what you want, as the article suggests.

@AbbieNormal i am not a guile user, by the way.

i just find it illogical to say proprietary software is better because you have trouble with guile.

@AbbieNormal it has momentum, because it's been around for a while. its userbase is, again, tiny compared with visual studio code.

the number of projects you will find to add features and extensions to visual studio code dwarf the ones to add them to emacs, and that's a measure of success you can't argue with.

@AbbieNormal and have you filed an issue on that?

@AbbieNormal it's also a different language from the 1970s, with support for dynamic scope, and well-tuned for its task -- emacs. guile (scheme in general) doesn't have that.

@AbbieNormal people pick up javascript/typescript a lot quicker than emacs, otherwise we'd all be writing and using emacs lisp extensions, right?

@AbbieNormal and what was their problem with it?

@AbbieNormal where do you get your numbers from?

if you bring up emacs, well, can't i point out that visual studio code has a lot more users than emacs?

@AbbieNormal there isn't a single scheme or lisp implementation, including ones with support for embedding in other applications (like libscheme, or embeddable common lisp) that have a large userbase. if you think the syntax has nothing to do with it, i'd like to know why people aren't flocking to it.

@AbbieNormal clojure is older than kotlin, yet has a much tinier userbase. like, negligible in comparison.