Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I think any language which is "better" (i.e. is known by more
> programmers) will have the same problems.

For October 2014 the TIOBE Programming Community index gives the following 
ratings for the ten most popular programming languages:

  19.543 Java
  16.190 C
   5.749 C++
   4.825 C#
   4.512 Python
   2.561 PHP
   2.462 VB.NET
   2.292 JavaScript
   2.247 Perl
   1.825 Ruby

Since 2002, the #1 language in this somewhat-volatile index has always been 
either C or Java. So, by this measure at least, the only plausible "better" 
language would be Java, and if we went back to October 2014 even Java would be 
off the table.

The TIOBE Index isn't a perfect measure, of course. And I am not advocating that 
we rewrite the Emacs core in Java. My point is merely that C is not an unpopular 
language. If we want something unpopular, we could try Cobol at 0.909, or 
Haskell at 0.290, or Clojure at 0.190....

My source:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/tiobe_index (retrieved 2015-10-11)