Re: emacs roadmap

[Tony Day <zygomega@gmail.com>]

> Lexical closures are supported natively since Emacs-24.  Namespaces are
> another beast altogether, and there's not much on the horizon there either.

Ok, so now I understand defvar, lol.  Not much use of lexical scoping in the wild - this was all I could find: http://github.com/nicferrier/elnode


>>  - first-class print for functions?
> 
> Not sure what that would be.
> 

ELISP> (defun foo()
    '(1 2 3))

ELISP> (as-string 'foo)

(defun foo()
    '(1 2 3))

Would be very useful for debugging.

>> More generally, when can we get turtles all the way down and enjoy the
>> return of the symbolic machine?
> 
> My experience with Lisp machines has been fairly limited, so I'm not
> sure what would be the thing that is most sorely missing.

Tounge was slightly in cheek.  What annoys me 100 times a day is having to switch away from the emacs environment to a browser and I was imagining that the technical difficulties involved in getting a decent browser rendering might coincide with the point at which C is needed to get closer to the *nix machine metal.  I'm half hoping that things like guile 2 pushing lisp further down the chain might one day lead to an emacs os (a personal preference not a recommendation).