I thought this too when I read the article. Then it occurred to me that I don't have any idea how many developers work on plugins for either. Looking naively at github files by type is unreliable, since so many people do things like keep their .vimrc and .vim files on github which artificially inflates the number of .vimL repositories.
What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. So at least morally, there are sufficiently developers for both emacs and vim (in my experience).
> What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it.
Maybe it's just my anecdotal evidence, but I've looked for alternatives to certain emacs plugins used by my co-workers (such as org-mode and ensime) and couldn't find a suitable replacement (I know there are some alternatives for vim, but they pale in comparison to their emacs counterparts).
I know it's the old cliche, but I love emacs largely for that reason. When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X. The longer I spend in it the less convoluted simple text editing becomes, I just think there is a high barrier to entry that is daunting even for command line jockeys.
I still vi/vim everyday too though, mostly because some things, like embedded stuff I work on, emacs would be too much, so it's very much situational.
> When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X
And you don't even have to bother with that, thanks to TRAMP mode, which lets you open files on a local emacs from a remote system. You can even do it with sudo[1]!
I believe vim does have rudimentary sftp/scp support, but tramp can make it seem like a remote system is just an extension of your local system.
What I do know is that if there's something I want done, I suspect there is a plugin that does it. So at least morally, there are sufficiently developers for both emacs and vim (in my experience).