Re: Guile in Emacs

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 21:13 +0200, Christian Lynbech wrote:
> >>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net> writes:
> 
> >> Wouldn't it be about as good (and probably less work), to give up on the
> >> guile idea and evolve emacs lisp (with Miles's lexical-bind changes, and
> >> (one hopes) multithreading, and maybe other things)?
> 
> Thomas> I dunno.  Maybe.  I'd guess that, no, that's not a 
> Thomas> good strategy.   Four reasons come quickly to mind: ...
> 
> Wouldn't a reasonable alternative to using a scheme implementation be to
> use a Common Lisp ditto?

I would have a hard time arguing conclusively that that
would be unreasonable.

Scheme is tidier and more compact and yields more
interesting subsets.  I think that Scheme currently
enjoys way more R&D than CL.  So I'd be on Scheme over
CL for the general GNU extension language (not just
for Emacs).   And I don't suppose that legacy Emacs
lisp code should in any way be allowed to hold back or
mess up the design of a GNU extension language.

But there are are good arguments both ways and
I think you are right that a CL "ditto" might be
a good alternative.


>  And wouldn't that be a much closer fit
> semantically to the current Emacs Lisp dialect?

Yes, I think it would.   I'm free enough in my current
position in life that I can afford to be cavalier and
say "Eh, who cares about all that tonnage of extant
Emacs lisp code.  What's the Right Thing if we discount
that code?"   I can't sell you or anyone on that attitude
and it might just be flat out wrong.  It's just, at least,
a position worth considering in the "big picture".



> I kind of hear you suggesting ditching all of the existing Emacs Lisp in
> favour of starting over from scratch with scheme. 


Yeah, I am, but I don't see anyone who is an obvious 
candidate to take on such a huge job with no guaranteed
success at the end.   As I said (and the scare-quotes are
significant):  it's something that "someone" should do.



> While it will be easy to list examples of existing libraries few will
> miss, emacs killer features such as gnus or org-mode still represent
> significant investments that are not easily reproduced from scratch.

Sure.  But don't misunderestimate the rapidity with
which a programmer fluent in both Emacs lisp and Scheme
can sit down and port those programs from one language to
the other.   (The one that really scares *me* is calc.el!)

-t




> 
> 
> ------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
> Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
> ------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
> Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
>                                         - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)