Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> It might be ok to add some keyword arguments to `sort', which are more
> unusual and complex to use, but not to simple constructs like
> `pushnew'.  This is Emacs Lisp, not Common Lisp.

What does that last sentence mean?  I hope this is not a too
philosophical question, but what constitutes "Emacs Lisp"?  It would
seem peculiar if it were to be defined by the arbitrary decisions of the
past, constrained by the contingent circumstances of the time.
Certainly part of it is that it is part of a tradition of Lisp
implementations, that gives it a distinctive flavour, but to me the main
aspects and attractions of Emacs Lisp (in contrast to CL and Scheme)
have been:

1. Not standardised; it is possible to extend the language without
   having to worry about how many implementations will follow along

2. Accepting Unix; not trying to abstract over various different
   operating systems and file systems, making it easier to work with GNU
   and other POSIX-based environments.

The first point would be relevant here.  Just like if-let or
thread-first, Emacs Lisp can learn from interesting ideas that other
languages provide, adapt and add them, making them available to
everyone.  If a form expresses something that people frequently want to
do, but either have to elaborate using (unless (memq ...) (push ...)),
then we are making Emacs more useful and expressive by providing the
functionality OOTB.  And isn't that the real point of Emacs Lisp?