Re: 10 problems with Elisp, part 10 (was: Re: Emacs website, Lisp, and other)

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> There's nothing more natural than an editor analyzing text
> in a buffer. Why it frustrates you is beyond me.

Sure, as is analyzing chemical substances in chemistry.

And it is well known that instead of using machines and
well-known methods from the outside to do the job, the
chemists are swimming around in the substances mucking around
with individual molecules giving explicit instructions what
should happen for each case?

Oh, no, all computing is the same, basically, we have of
course specific problems and applications here, but instead of
doing the old thing we should move up one level of abstraction
and be there instead, and focus not on "getting the job done"
but instead getting it done in a way that is much better than
what we - to a large extent - have been doing so far.

Everyone has a problem domain with specific characteristics
that isn't the same as do stuff on the detail level,
"everyone" doesn't do that if that is what you thought.

> Emacs Lisp is not a general-purpose programming language.

It doesn't matter what it is, it can be better, we should aim
for that.

> It is a language for implementing Emacs and Emacs
> extensions. Thus, comparing it with Python is, in general,
> simply wrong.

Yes, Python is incomparable to Emacs Lisp and would probably
win quite even against the collective Lisp world, I'm afraid.

Lisp would probably loose to some other languages as well.

> We can compare a few specific aspects, but not the languages
> as a whole, and definitely not their success rate: the scope
> of Emacs Lisp is limited to Emacs, which is orders of
> magnitude more narrow than the scope of Python (or any other
> general-purpose programming language).

Emacs is the bastion of Lisp, if we care about Lisp we should
do what we can to make Elisp more competitive altho we should
focus on getting better, and not compare us to other languages
as we are way too far behind in many areas, I'm afraid.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal