Re: Emacs Lisp's future (was: Guile emacs thread (again))

[Jorgen Schaefer <forcer@forcix.cx>]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 18:03:17 +0200
Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Stefan Monnier
> <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
> > The main problems I see with that:
> > - Elisp is slow and as CPUs aren't getting faster, its slowness
> > makes itself
> >   noticed more often.
> > - Lack of some features, most notably FFI and concurrency.
> > - Lack of manpower.
> >
> 
> Perhaps also the lack of possibility to enhance Emacs with code
> written in other languages? I think for example that Javascript will
> be something most future programmers will know. Could Guile make it
> easier to enhance Emacs with Javascript (as an alternative to Elisp)?

I think the (often-cited, not just here) idea of supporting multiple
languages is a red herring, mostly. Every extension language supported
adds some burden on those who want to understand what their editor
does, not just use pre-packaged code. One of the great things about
Emacs is that, once I know ELisp, I have a good chance of understanding
and modifying any extension I see. And learning Emacs Lisp is not
exactly hard.

But we do not have to be all theoretical here. There is an editor which
supports a dozen extension languages. The paradoxical thing to notice
when you look at vim plugins is that most of them are written in VimL,
including rather complex ones like NERD-tree and fugitive. I'd argue
that VimL is a tiny bit harder to learn and use than ELisp. There are
various reasons for why most plugins are written in it, but I do think
that this is a pretty good indicator that the lack of "common" languages
for extension is not exactly high on the list of problems for an editor.

There are plenty of things in ELisp itself that I'd put much higher on
that list.

- Lack of a common structured datatype. While there's cl-defstruct, the
  support is a bit limited (C-h f does not work well with it), and a
  lot of code simply does not use it, making it seem a bit like a
  red-haired stepchild instead of a core recommended language feature.
  Alists and plists are usually used where modern languages would use
  structured datatypes, or even some hack with cons cells or lists and
  indexed access.
- Hashes are one of those data types that are used all over the place
  in other languages, but you see them rarely in Emacs Lisp, again often
  losing out to alists and plists. This might be related to the
  standard library functions being a bit baroque. (There's some
  third-party hash library somewhere.)
- Speaking of third-party libraries, s.el, dash.el and f.el provide
  things that really ought to be in core Emacs.
- The regex engine is annoying to use. Providing some interface to PCRE
  would be a great step forward, and does not even have to be
  backwards-incompatible.
- There are tons of warts in Emacs Lisp. nth vs. elt for example,
  with their exciting incompatible calling conventions.

One thing I think would benefit Emacs Lisp as a language a lot would be
a standard library cleanup. An effort to go through the libraries that
come with Emacs, separate them into "standard library" and "extensions
that come with Emacs", and then go through the "standard library",
provide sane names when necessary (like setcar is provided for rplaca)
and deprecating the old ones, or simply deprecate all but one version of
functions with overlapping use (nth or elt, pick one). Finally, add
standard libraries for common functionality that is currently lacking
(see above).

The next step would be going through the "extensions that come with
Emacs" and make sure they all use namespace prefixes for anything but
very specific commands meant for users to use with M-x. Only standard
library functions are allowed to be namespace-free.

These things would make Emacs Lisp a lot easier to use and also easier
to learn for new users.

This is all doable, but it needs manpower (#3 on Stefans list). Which
is manpower that would not be doing other cool stuff on Emacs.

Regards,
Jorgen