Re: seq.el and the complexity of Emacs Lisp.

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > ...you are loosing me here. I'm still wondering what seq/map are good
  > for in the first place. Considering something "cleaner" is just a
  > feeling, isn't it? A feeling I don't share.

I don't concretely know, as I have not used them myself.  But I suppose
that the seq- functions do the same jobs as the cl- sequence functions.

  > > Could we replace all the cl-lib sequence function calls with seq-
  > > calls, in core and GNU ELPA code?  Seq is simpler and cleaner, so that
  > > would be an improvement.  We could keep cl-lib permanently for
  > > compatibility for external code, but it would not need to be loaded
  > > (into Emacs or your brain) very often.

  > But does that really make sense? Using either is somewhat subjective.

It is ok for a decision like this, about which of two alternative
solutions is better, to be somewhat subjective.  But it is clearly
somewhat objective too/

  > Saying lets just drop these in a sec to all package authors seems
  > overreaching.

The concept of "overreach" is not applicable to a technical decision
like this.  This isn't about respecting or not respecting anyone's
personal rights.

Surely we should not accept a moral principle that Emacs should
contain all the alternative solutions that are at least halfway
acceptable.  We must be able to limit what we include.

  > You write like lets just remove cl-lib and forget that is existed.
  > As mentioned elsewhere cl-lib isn't just sequence functions..

That is true.  This would affect the CL sequence functions, of which
it seems many or all are defined in cl-seq.el.

The overall issue concerns the CL functions in general, because of the
way they tend to be alternate versions of important facilities defined
by Emacs Lisp.  Having those sets of alternatives is a kind of bloat.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)