Re: Tree-sitter introduction documentation

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2022 07:59:18 +0100
> 
> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
> 
> > My main worry with these changes, along with the popularity of LSP is
> > that while they are technological improvements, they all happen at the
> > deterioration of Emacs' introspectability, increasing the effort it
> > takes for the user to make changes.  IIUC you can't reload a .el file or
> > just a singular expression if you want to change how completion via
> > Eglot or how imenu works via Tree Sitter.  A simple hack becomes a
> > weekend project.  This is not an unconditional good.
> 
> That's a very good point. My .02 cents of experience with eglot/treesit:
> 
> while I'm happy it works now on my multi-OS setup and I can seamlessly switch computers, it took me a lot
> of time to understand and duck-duck-go and set up. On top of that, there are some things I still don't
> completely understand and can't explore on the *scratch* buffer and/or slime. 

Using technology that is implemented outside Emacs inevitably means we
have less transparency in Emacs itself for the related
functionalities.  However, hoping that everything can be implemented
by the Emacs project, and refusing to use external libraries for some
areas for that reason, is an evolutionary dead end for Emacs.  So we
have to do that to some degree where key technologies applicable to
Emacs features are available out there.  The job of the maintainers is
to identify those technologies, weigh their potential contributions to
future Emacs development, and decide whether those contributions
justify their use, with all the disadvantages in transparency that
will inevitably bring with it.

> And yes, I've also tried tree-sitter for Python on my Linux and it makes me wonder what the real gain is,
> because I'm using the plain python-mode on the other systems and I can't feel a compelling argument to
> switch.

Thank you for your feedback.  This is the reason we decided to keep
these modes separate and make trying the new tree-sitter based modes
as easy as possible.  This is also the kind of user feedback we will
need to collect when Emacs 29 is released, which will help us to
decide how to use tree-sitter based capabilities.  The decisions could
be different for different programming languages.