Re: Shrinking the C core

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 at 01:03:28AM +0200, Emanuel Berg wrote:

[Setting mail-followup-to, in the hopes to redirect this
thread to a more appropriate place]

> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> 
> >> I don't know why you reject them as clumsy, but why does it
> >> matter to us if a tool includes features we don't use?
> >
> > It matters a very great deal. In practice you cannot avoid
> > "using" these features if you have to understand or debug
> > somebody else's code.
> 
> But it is up to him/her how [s]he writes his/her code.

This is absolutely naïve. A language (a computer language,
too) is a communication device, and therefore inherently
a social construct.

There's always a tension (and different languages solve this
in different ways) between allowing too much width (and thus
creating different, possibly disjoint subcultures (cf. C++)
and unifying too much, thus suffocating possible creativity.

There's no (technically) "right solution" to this social
question.

In the case of Emacs Lisp, we'll have to accept that people
like Richard and Eli carry more weight in those questions
than you and me, be it because they've put orders of magnitude
more of work in there than us.

Cheers
-- 
t

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