RE: [External] : Re: Lift {global,local}-key-binding to Lisp

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> The important thing to note is that we have more people that know Lisp
> than we have that know (the Emacs dialect of) C.  This affects reading,
> debugging and modifying code.

Yes. But it's not only that more know Lisp.

1. Elisp is part of the Emacs UI.  It's an intimate
   part of using Emacs, for many users.  And it should
   be, for most.

2. Many users will not have downloaded and installed
   the C source code.  The Lisp code is included in
   prebuilt MS Windows binaries, as well it should be
   (see #1).

It should not be controversial that whatever can
reasonably be defined in Lisp, should be.  What's
"reasonable"?  Presumably most things that don't
touch toolkit, window manager, display, etc., and
that aren't performance critical.

The recent `length-<' etc. additions come to mind...

> For example, I have no doubt that you are intimately familiar with gdb,
> but you will find that many Emacs users will be much more familiar with
> edebug.  In fact, you can safely assume that almost anyone looking to
> contribute to Emacs will be very familiar with Emacs Lisp, but you can
> in my opinion _not_ assume that they will be familiar with C.

Yup.  No-brainer, IMHO.

> >> Of course, any such change taken in isolation will look like something
> >> we could also live without, but many such incremental improvements over
> >> time will start to make a difference for the better.  Clean and
> >> maintainable code is a good thing, and Lisp is better for that than C.
> >
> > I disagree, so let's please not do that unless we also add some
> > significant improvements or simplification.
> 
> I admit this response surprised me.  As far as I'm concerned, these
> arguments (functional programming, memory safety, etc.) were settled a
> long time ago.  But I suppose we can agree to disagree on this point.

Good luck, Stefan K.