Re: [External] : Emacs website, Lisp, and other

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>
> Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2024 08:17:16 +0200
> 
> If you do this on the source:
> 
>   awk '/\(defun /{print $2}' **/*.el | sort -u | wc -l
> 
> you get: 45 865
> 
> This is beyond me. How can we, in 2024, with Emacs development
> going on for 39 years, 4 months and 26 days, so far resulting
> in the writing of possibly _forty-five thousand_ Elisp
> functions - this is excluding ELPA, MELPA, and local code -
> how can we ask for basic math functions, functions that give
> you every word or sentence in a paragraph, and so on?

We have everything that we need (and if we need more, we add after
examining and analyzing the needs).  Emacs is not an exercise in
providing set of APIs that satisfies some academical notion of
"completeness", especially not when what's "complete" is judged from a
POV that has very little to do with the actual design and purpose of
Emacs (as opposed to some GP programing language or library).

IOW, if an API is not in the set, it is rarely if ever needed in
Emacs.  If you claim that a function to give you every word in a
sentence or a paragraph is needed, you need to justify that by
describing the relevant real-life use cases that make sense for Emacs
jobs.

> Well, one thing is sure, if it really is that bad, let's not
> blame Lisp.

Indeed.  In fact, there's no "blame" here at all, IMNSHO.