I bet if Emacs was rewritten using Electron, javascript instead of elisp, and normal key bindings instead of the carpal-tunnel-inducing keybindings it would be significantly more popular.

Oh wait, Atom and Visual Studio Code already did this and are hugely popular: https://insights.stackoverflow...

Emacs had good ideas to make an extensible editor with a built-in programming language, but the world has moved on to use more modern technologies to build such an editor.

I'm a software engineer with LMTSS (Transportation and Security Solutions - the business unit that just won NARA). I don't know all the licensing details of this, but I know guys down the hall who are quite happily writing kernel modules for 2.6 to support proprietary hardware used in air traffic control systems we run on Linux.

To be sure though, not all is rosy and open source at LM... I'm currently working on a project that's being developed in a weird combination of C++ and Ada on AIX, using lots of wacky, expensive, definitely closed-source tools. No gnat or gcc for me... it's all Visual Age and PowerAda (which have the annoying property of producing binaries generally impossible to debug with gdb). I really need to look into moving to other projects...