From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David Kastrup Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs Lisp's future Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:21:21 +0200 Organization: Organization?!? Message-ID: <877g12v6fi.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> References: <87wq97i78i.fsf@earlgrey.lan> <87ha06zffn.fsf@ferrier.me.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1410952933 1695 80.91.229.3 (17 Sep 2014 11:22:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:22:13 +0000 (UTC) To: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Sep 17 13:22:07 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDJG-0004O5-P1 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:22:06 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:44139 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDJG-0005aT-9w for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:22:06 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:60233) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDIx-0005aJ-O3 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:21:53 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDIr-00069v-LS for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:21:47 -0400 Original-Received: from plane.gmane.org ([80.91.229.3]:47989) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDIr-00069C-Ek for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:21:41 -0400 Original-Received: from list by plane.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1XUDIm-0004Fp-CY for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:21:36 +0200 Original-Received: from x2f52776.dyn.telefonica.de ([2.245.39.118]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:21:36 +0200 Original-Received: from dak by x2f52776.dyn.telefonica.de with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:21:36 +0200 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ Original-Lines: 97 Original-X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: x2f52776.dyn.telefonica.de X-Face: 2FEFf>]>q>2iw=B6, xrUubRI>pR&Ml9=ao@P@i)L:\urd*t9M~y1^:+Y]'C0~{mAl`oQuAl \!3KEIp?*w`|bL5qr,H)LFO6Q=qx~iH4DN; i"; /yuIsqbLLCh/!U#X[S~(5eZ41to5f%E@'ELIi$t^ Vc\LWP@J5p^rst0+('>Er0=^1{]M9!p?&:\z]|;&=NP3AhB!B_bi^]Pfkw User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4.50 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:eaUv7B9P+cSpbmF0UBR7x75kWMI= X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-Received-From: 80.91.229.3 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:174411 Archived-At: Nic Ferrier writes: > Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes: > >> I think there's a somewhat greater cultural overlap between Emacs Lisp >> and Common Lisp people ("get things done") than between Emacs Lisp >> people and Scheme people ("interesting academically"). >> >> Anyway, I think the dangled sorta-promise that Emacs would eventually >> shift to Guile might have stifled Emacs Lisp development. Whenever >> somebody has brought up the issue of evolving Emacs Lisp (to >> multi-threadedness or whatever's fun), they're usually discouraged by >> others piping in with "oh, Emacs is moving to Guile, anyway, so don't >> bother". > > I don't think that's true. > > From my perspective, what's stopping more people getting involved is the > community, which is sometimes quite negative and the tooling, which is > baroque. Well, let's take a comparison: git shortlog -s --since "1 month ago" origin/master in a current GUILE repository gives 2 Andy Wingo while in a current Emacs repository it gives 4 Alan Mackenzie 1 Alp Aker 4 Christoph Scholtes 1 Christopher Schmidt 5 Daniel Colascione 1 Detlev Zundel 27 Dmitry Antipov 50 Eli Zaretskii 1 Fabián Ezequiel Gallina 26 Glenn Morris 1 Ivan Shmakov 5 Jan D. 1 Jay Belanger 1 João Távora 1 Kan-Ru Chen 1 Karol Ostrovsky 3 Katsumi Yamaoka 8 Ken Brown 1 Ken Olum 1 Lars Ljung 2 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen 4 Leo Liu 15 Michael Albinus 1 Michael Heerdegen 34 Paul Eggert 1 Rasmus Pank Roulund 1 Reuben Thomas 9 Sam Steingold 16 Stefan Monnier 2 Thierry Volpiatto 1 YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu 8 martin rudalics That does not particularly make Emacs look like a project keeping people from getting involved. Of course, the project/repository structure of both projects is different, but the basic idea that forward-looking development happens in the master branch is loosely common to both. If we take GNU LilyPond, incidentally based on GUILE 1.8, for reference, we get something like git shortlog -s --since "1 month ago" origin 60 David Kastrup 4 James Lowe 6 Janek Warchoł 3 Jean-Charles Malahieude 4 Julien Rioux 5 Keith OHara 19 Phil Holmes 3 Trevor Daniels 1 Walter Garcia-Fontes Now this is a project that has to suffer from a lead developer who is considered to be sometimes (or more) quite negative, and the tooling, namely GUILE 1.8 which is considered outdated and unmaintained for something like 5 years or so, can also be called baroque. The result is a quite more peaked distribution of contributions per developer than with Emacs which has sort of a plateau at the top. So I think that the news of Emacs' demise due to the named reasons is quite exaggerated. There is always room for improvement, of course, but no particular need to panic. -- David Kastrup